Some thoughts on the idea of a "Consensus WG", and other things.
("K" = Kevin; "A" = Antony, in the following. If I mess up an attribution,
please forgive me.)
A: You are making the chair a committee with this suggestion -- the chair
A: essentially performs the function you would assign to a committee.
K: I would expect that the Consensus Working Group would be subject to
K: recall at the pleasure of the Membership; in addition, that the Membership
K: would have an explicit method for pulling the plug on the Consensus
K: Working Group concept itself
Note that there is a distinction between the term "Working Group" and
the term "Committee". As described, the "Consensus WG" is really a
standing committee, and, I think, might therefore be better named the
"Consensus Committee" -- a WG generally is oriented towards a
specific, relatively short-term goal. So I will use that
terminology, to see how it looks...
More in the vein of the above points, though, a committee could either
be selected by the membership at large, or could be appointed by the
chair -- there are various pros and cons with either method. (I will
get to those below).
In general, the idea of a "Consensus Committee" is a little
speculative. However, there are two specific, related tasks that are
quite prominent at this moment -- one is running elections, the other
is keeping track of the membership.
In addition, I note that in the IETF straw polls are very frequently
used to determine consensus. A WG chair will ask "How many people
feel they are knowledgable enough about this esoteric technical issue
to have an opinion?" (about 10% raise their hands) "Of those
knowledgable enough, how many think we should do X?" -- and so on.
So there is no conflict between finding consensus and running
elections, and in fact they are closely related.
I note further that many organizations have an "Election Committee"
-- I don't know, from personal experience, what these committees do,
but the name is certainly suggestive.
My obvious suggestion, therefore, is that if we are to have a
committee, that there is a natural collection of functions that could
be included.
[...]
K: I am suggesting that
K: this WG model might get people interested/active again. What concerns
K: me is why it is that so many of us are quick to find takeover conspiracies
K: under every rock and behind every governance proposal?
A: I don't see myself as someone who quickly finds conspiracies. I don't
A: think it's in the least unlikely that this group, which has no purpose
A: other than duplicating the function of the Chair, will decide to take it
A: upon themselves to decide what the PAB Membership really "ought" to have
A: said, or to bend results ever so slightly to fit their own purposes.
A: That's not conspiracy, that's human nature, and our institutions ought to
A: be set up to guard against that sort of thing, not to encourage it.
That's one of my primary concerns, as you know.
There are two reasons for creating substructure: First, as Kevin
suggests, it gets more people involved, and second, it takes some of
the load off the officers. This later point may not seem too
important now, but I believe that will change -- it is my belief that
the natural course of events will make PAB more visible over the next
few months, and that membership will swell.
I confess that I am not sure what a Consensus Committee would do. But
if you throw in running elections and keeping track of membership, the
committee would not just be duplicating the functions of the chair.
Right now elections are run by volunteers; a committee could be
populated via 1) a call for volunteers, 2) explicit appointment by the
chair, 3) a popular vote.
Calling for volunteers has the problem of accountability of volunteers.
Appointment by chair has the problem of abuse of power -- you don't,
generally, want the officers to control the elections.
A popular vote has the problem of complexity -- we have a hard enough
time electing officers.
Each of the alternatives has their positive aspects, as well.
-- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html
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