+1 on all the points Mark made below
On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Mark Shewmaker wrote:
On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 08:36:38AM -0600, wayne wrote:
The Council decided, quite arbitrarily, that the terms should be for
one year, which would end at the end of the month. That means we need
to either hold new elections ASAP, or decide to disolve the SPF
Council.
I vote for elections ASAP, because:
1. I'm still in favor of an spf organization of some sort. The council
by itself is still a "good enough" solution for that for me (by far).
Without the council, then we're back at square one with a "who
really controls the domain name", "who controls/represents the
site", and all the various reasons we wanted a council in the first
place.
With the council, we have a lightweight structure that in theory can
answer these questions, and in practice has answered them very well.
2. No matter how clear the consensus might be internally that we
all want some term-changing decision by fiat, (say to extend
the current council members' terms for another year), that
would just look bad externally--making it seem as if the council
is not really representative.
However, an election (which will probably come to the same result),
won't have such a negative external spin.
Actually *really* having elections is one of those annoying things
you just have to do in order to claim to be representative.
(Plus it can legitimize the for-one-year-term thing.)
3. The fact that the council hasn't had to be very busy is not a
reason to abandon the idea, on the contrary, to me it's evidence
that the council is working just fine.
The last thing I'd want is for the council to do all this needless
work, burning each other out with work that no one supports.
The fact that they've set things up so there's no need to spend
this time in (appropriately) slow periods is a *good* thing in my
mind.
Maybe after the next ietf action someone can write an official
response that the council can bless, or something like that,
but..we're not at a point where there's a need to publicize things,
nor is there a present need to make a lot of "executive decisions"
on things that have to be decided upon but don't really lend themselves
to answers based on clear technical advantages.
4. You can't force anything on a voluntary organization. You can make
it possible to solve problems, and you can make it easier, but you
can't *make* it happen. If you try, you'll just annoy people.
So I'd want an organizational structure just strong enough that
volunteers can volunteer.
And that's what we have. Woohoo!
As an example:
I have some complaints about the lack of a good openspf website.
These complaints are almost entirely directed towards myself, as
I've not written some documents I've meant to, etc.
I like the fact that if I do get these things written, and submitted
to the appropriate folks, that my articles/edits have somewhere to
go.
Without a council, it's as if I'd be submitting the articles to
slashdot or some other site--nice, maybe, but it wouldn't be
associated with the actual *project*.
The wonderful thing about this is that I can submit articles without
any council involvement really--that is, it doesn't take council meeting
time, or cause burnout of members--it only causes work for the folks
who are currently volunteering to vet articles.
That's just wonderful. And...it would to a large part disappear
if the council did. (Or at least the fact that this wasn't all part
of a representative organization would..change things somewhat.)
Personally, I think we should disolve the SPF Council. There hasn't
been a meeting for months and that is because no one has offered any
agenda items that needed to be decided on. I don't foresee enough
decisions in the future that we need an SPF Council to decide on.
One of the reasons I strongly dislike bureaucracies is that they tend
to long outlive their original purpose and usually outlive any
purpose.
As long as we need an openspf website, I'd want a council.
I agree with your bureaucracy comment, and it does worry me that I
effectively want there to always be an spf organization, but...at least
it seems to be pretty anti-bureucratic and looks to stay that way for
the forseable future.
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