I want to thank all of you for the vote(s) of confidence in recommending me as the IPMC chair. While it's always possible that the Board will decline the suggestion, it doesn't seem too terribly presumptuous to start looking ahead.
My goal is to continue along the path blazed by Jukka, and then, like him, hand over. So, set your egg-timers for a bit more than a year, and think, please, about stepping up. I think that the shepherd system has worked well. At the same time, I think that it was invented to compensate for a problem, and that we could make additional progress toward resolving that problem. Why do we have shepherds? Because we have had mentors who have found it impractical to exercise detailed supervision on the podlings. Our job as an entire PMC is to supervise the podlings. It seems logical to me that the mentors of each podling would provide that supervision. Of course, things happen. Shepherds have been helping to detect holes and compensate for those things. With this idea in mind, for December, I do not want to eliminate shepherds. But I want to float a proposal that might, over time, help us stop needing them. At the bottom of the template for each podling's report, I'd like to have a space for each of the mentors, every month, to reaffirm his or her involvement in the podling. Thus, instead of (at most) one mentor signing off on the report, itself, we'd get a reading on how many mentors are in the game. If the number were less than 3 -- and -- especially, if it were less than one, we'd be alerted and could make it a priority to find replacements. What do you think?
