[r6rs-discuss] Scheme Language Steering Committee election: comment period is open

[Alan Bawden]

   Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:29:12 +0100
   From: Michael Sperber <sperber at deinprogramm.de>

   I would like to take the opportunity to thank Mitch, Alan and Guy for
   their excellent service on the Steering Committee: Their work has been
   more valuable and important than is publically known, and I am deeply
   grateful.

You're welcome.

   A comment on the election process: I think the general concept of having
   the community select the Steering Committee is good.  I'm a bit worried
   that the process (at least as I currently understand it) will ultimately
   more or less independently select three people and throw them together.
   As we all know (even if we'd all like things to be different), some
   combinations of personalities work better together than others, and with
   only three people on the Steering Committee, it may be difficult to
   counterbalance bad chemistry.

Indeed, the current charter explicitly calls for a three member SC, and it
does seem like a bad personality combination could make that fail to work
well.  The -current- SC could have amended the charter to make the -next-
SC larger (say, 5 members), but we wanted to avoid tinkering with things on
our way out the door -- preferring instead to leave that sort of thing up
to the next -next- SC.

But it does strike me that altering the -size- of the SC is one of the few
alterations to the charter that it would be really awkward to perform after
our replacements are selected -- forcing them to immediately select more
people somehow.

So if anyone wants to argue that we should alter the charter so that this
becomes an election for 5 (or some other number) seats, I think that would
be in order during this comment period.

I'm not saying we'd definitely agree to doing that -- I'm not speaking in
any official capacity here -- I'm just saying that this is the kind of
thing that it might be productive to discuss.

- Alan