Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
| As membership of "the Haskell community" is not well-defined, and voting | would potentially be open to abuse if anyone were able to vote, we | propose that the committee should choose their replacements from open | nominations.
I agree with the problem, and I think your proposed solution may do for now, but it's obviously not a robust solution. I trust you five, but in three years time you may all have stood down!
A possible solution would be to have an "electoral college" of people entitled to vote. It should be easy to become a member of the college: any track record of contributions to the Haskell community, including constructive contributions to Haskell Cafe, would be enough. Then the college can elect the committee.
It's debatable whether this is worth the bother at this point. Maybe it would be enough to document on the committee page that we don't regard the nomination process as robust, and if any concern arises we will consider something more substantial.
FWIW, the IETF faces the same situation, and addresses it through a Nominating Committee (NomCom) mechanism, which for the most part has worked well for many years (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3777). #g