Dear GHC steering committee Re GHC proposals I was talking to Simon M about - Making the shepherd's job easier and quicker - Providing a way for members of the committee to say (explicitly) "I don't have an opinion about this proposal" and thus recuse themselves. Explicit recusal is better than "silence means assent" because silence can, and often does, mean "I'm under water and not listening". With that in mind, I want to revive my suggestion of running an online spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e6GdwHmAjeDEUhTvP-b18MDkpTfH3SMHhFu5...to describe the state of proposals that are in our active purview. That is, I'm not proposing to show proposals that are under discussion by the community, or accepted etc -- just the ones that are in our inbox, *where the next action is ours.* That makes it much easier to see our current inbox, without looking back for Jocahim's last email and then adding deltas for all the emails since -- which I cannot do in my head. Specifically, I have *a column for each committee member's vote. * That should make it easy for the shepherd to see who is yet to express an opinion, which I always find difficult. As I say above, I am very uncomfortable with "silence means assent" for any but the smallest proposals. *I suggest instead that if there is a proposal where you feel unable to offer an opinion, due to lack of expertise, or lack of time, you can say "recuse" meaning that you explicitly want to stand down from this particular proposal.* (Somehow "abstain" carries a connotation of conflict of interest or something, but it amounts to the same thing.) If you are too under water to even recuse yourself, maybe it's time to step down. So in columns F to O we should see explicit responses from every committee member, in a timely way. Joachim doesn't like spreadsheets like this because they can easily get out of date. But it must be better than manually trawling email. *And it is up to each of us (not Joachim) to fill in our own column for proposals in our inbox.* If we don't like it, we can change it. You all have edit rights. I have populated it with data from Joachim's message of 2 Sept, but there has been some action since then, so shepherds please update it. This is not Joachim's task! Thanks Simon