Hi, On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 22:54:00 -0800, Jason Dagit wrote: > I'm not sure about the existence of an oversight committee. It seems to me > that the purpose Eric is proposing for the oversight committee is to > essentially put a "check and balance" on the dictator. That is, we have an > oligarchy instead of a true dictatorship.
To be clear, the Oversight Committee has exactly one function, which is to depose the Benevolent Dictactor (should the need arise) and replace him or her with somebody else. I suspect that in the future, as our community grows, we will have to shift to an increasingly group-based decision making process, for example, by growing the Oversight Committee into a proper Steering Committee. You can see the founding of an oversight committee as the very first step in this process. > So, is the true purpose of this committee to provide a way for the community > to say, "We're at a point where we want to fork, but we'd rather pick a new > maintainer instead." ? This is the stated purpose of the committee. It's not a general decision-making body, but a safety mechanism. > If I'm understanding all of this correctly, then I think Eric's intent is to > have a way to make designating new maintainers easy and he wants to also > guard against forks that are created by developers who disagree with the > direction of Darcs. I agree that these are important cases to consider. I want us to have a slightly less traumatic alternative to forking. This is really meant to be a last resort (short of forking). It's never going to be "easy", but it does allow for life to go on. > I don't know if we're at a point where our social and technical > infrastructure can handle it, but I suspect a more ideal approach would be > to embrace forks and encourage collaboration between forks so that the only > purpose of an oversight committee is to pick new maintainers when one > chooses to resign. This could reduce the matter to one of choosing which > fork becomes the new official fork. This sounds like it might be an interesting way to work, but at this point in time, I don't believe it would be very practical. > My next concern is what is the legal impact for members of an oversight > committee? If darcs is ever brought into a court case will these individual > be expected to participate? If so, will the SFC still have enough resources > to manage that? Will they need their own lawyers? The original impetus behind the creation of an Oversight Committee is to be able to tell the SFC exactly how to know who is our legitimate representative. That sounds like it has a fairly limited legal context. Furthermore, as you are aware, the SFC exists only to help us manage our funds, so the question of (say) darcs getting brought to court is not particularly relevant to them, as I understand it. Would you like me to forward it to Karen and Bradley anyway anyway? > What is the goal of asking at least one person to resign every 12 > months? I assume people will serve multiple terms, eg., you can be > re-elected many times. Again, I intend to leave this decision entirely up to the Committee (assuming that the wider darcs community has had some say in how the Committee should run). I thought that refreshing the Committee regularly would be a useful way of ensuring that it retains legitimacy in the eyes of the darcs community. As I mentioned in my reply to Ian, it might make sense for the committee to serve a few years before starting to replace members. Anyway, these are implementation details, and I hope we can resolve these details /after/ signing the agreement :-) > I would also recommend that David be given a permanent seat as a > point of respect and honour. Makes sense to me > I'm both honoured and flattered to be nominated, but also hesitant to > accept. I'm mainly hesitant because of the reasons I gave above. If > the community agrees that having a small group of representatives is > best then I would agree to be part of OSC#0. What concrete action may I take to assure you on these points? -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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