On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 6:56 AM Herbert Valerio Riedel
Proposal 1: Move to community election of the members of the Core Libraries Committee. Yes, I know this would have its own issues. How exactly do public elections of representatives address the problem that some people feel left out?
The issue of people feeling left out is addressed by the second part of his proposal, a low-volume (presumably announcements only) list where changes that are being seriously considered can be announced, along with pointers to the discussion areas. That way, the overhead of getting notices is near zero, and everyone can then decide whether to invest time in the
Back in February there was a large-scale survey which resulted (see [2] for more details) in a rather unequivocal 4:1 majority *for* going through with the otherwise controversial FTP implementation. If the community elections would result in a similar spirit, you'd could easily end up with a similarly 4:1 pro-change biased committee. Would you consider that a well balanced committee formation?
This shows two areas of confusion. The first is that the point of representation isn't to be well-balanced, or fair, or any such thing. it's to be representative of the community. Or at least, of some aspect of the community. Whether or not this is a problem and how to fix it are hard political problems that I doubt we're going to solve. The second is that the composition of the committee matters beyond the aspect they are supposed to represent. For instance, if the process doesn't leave final decisions in the hands of the committee, but in a general vote (just a for instance, not a proposal) then the balance or fairness of the committee is irrelevant, so long as the community trusts them to administer the process properly. In other words, we need to figure out exactly what the job of the committee is going to be before we start worrying about what kind of composition it should have. As for the issue of libraries vs. language, I think the same process should apply to both, though it might be administered by different groups in order to spread the workload around.