The requested changes, as far as I can tell, are being promoted as being required on legal advice. That seems to me to get the cart before the horse. If the functions of the Board seem to require certain changes, how about explaining and justifying them in terms of what we all expect of the Board? When I hear that "the lawyers said so," I always smell a rat, to put it bluntly.
If, instead, we were to hear that the functions of the Board are not being fulfilled under current arrangements, and that this is what the Board proposed to do about it, then the discussion could proceed towards consensus on what functions are proper to the Board, and, given that agreement, to precisely how they were best fulfilled. If, in the course of the discussion, there is disquiet about the proposals, it seems to me that, rather than saying, "it's the lawyers," a consensus approach would be to isolate those elements in the Constitution which are generating the problematical demands, and talk to the lawyers about changing them to reflect to reflect the concerns of the community of developers.
That doesn't seem to be happening.
One other interesting aspect of the debate is that it *appears* that the Board wishes the detailed oversight of, say, code quality, in a sub-project to occur at a level similar to the current project, and yet for the (current) sub-projects to report their status individually to the Board. This is my reading of the comment that the Board can whiz through all of the extra reports without any strain. If it's so simple, it doesn't amount to much of an oversight. If the hard yakka of code reviews and quality oversight is still within, e.g. the XML project, why not take one report from XML. I assume I've missed the point.
Peter -- Peter B. West <http://www.powerup.com.au/~pbwest/resume.html>
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