[First off, to avoid a bunch of silly posts: before responding to this message, please catch up on reading debian-vote. If there's thirty or so messages following this one it's pretty likely that what you want to say in response has already been said. Thanks.]
On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 06:38:53PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > This is a plausible approach to take; it's roughly what Manoj's > amendment would do. Oops, I'd forgotten about Manoj's amendment. Ok, I'm withdrawing my write up in favor of Manoj's. > But right now, you've probably gone and made things about ten times > worse. > > Because the Project Secretary has apparently vanished from the face of > the earth, you're it. As such, it's inappropriate for you to make > substantive suggestions about resolution, given that you will also be > the person charged with deciding constitutional questions and the > like. First off, Darren wrote me last week and explained what he was doing. I didn't forward the information to the list at the time, because I wanted to give him time to wrap things up. So, while there's some potential here I'm not approaching this from that point of view. Secondly, if no one seconds this (and, since Manoj has already done a better job, and I'm withdrawing it), it goes nowhere. Third, I have not, and would not, abuse any authority I might have. That is to say: if a proposal was being voted on that I had made, and there were other proposals and ammendments being voted on, I'd make very sure that the other proposals and ammendments got fair treatment. > So can I beg that you please not try and make substantive resolutions > just yet, and instead focus on reassembling some kind of rational and > unbiased procedure that makes sense? Now this is tricky. As you can see from Ian Jackson's proposal, we should have done something like Branden's proposal or Manoj's ammendmended proposal as one of our first orders of business after the constitution was passed. We didn't. So, we're stuck with the current situation where we're trying to build on a piece of infrastructure which isn't fully in place. > It might now be too late for you to do that with credibility, because > you are now making substantive proposals, and any procedure you > outline might be read as an attempt to get your proposal passed. But > maybe not. Heh. > We need a secretary, now, to deal with the current situation and to > focus on procedure. We *have* one. He's gotten a lot of negative criticism from the folks on this list. A number of people (who, near as I can tell, haven't even read what the constitution has to say about his job) have made all sorts of comments about how they think he should do his job this way or that way or not do it at all. Most of it was pompous posturing, but that doesn't mean he should completely ignore what's been said. There isn't any particular urgency for him to act at the moment, and he wants to make sure that what he says next is as correct as possible. But we do have a secretary. [And, to avoid the obvious knee-jerks: no, I don't consider "debian developers are arguing" as any kind of urgency -- I think we'll always have that. And it's not always a positive thing.] > I guess I would be happy to deal, but I have also made lots of > substantive statements about the present issues, and that would > probably mandate against me. THIS is the priority. There are plenty of > proposals on the table. I'll agree that Branden's and Manoj's are adequate. > We do not need more proposals. We need someone who is official in > charge of running the ballots and elections to actually do so. I understand your frustration, but I disagree with it. > There a jillion ways to get us there, but it takes, you, Wichert, and > Darren to actually DO IT. I promise I'll draw up a ballot before Branden's proposal expires -- if by some chance Darren doesn't take action by then. -- Raul
