As I hinted a couple of emails ago, I'd like to think about new models for
how Council might work, with the following things in mind:
1. There is a push underway to improve the gender balance of the Council
membership, which I'm fully in favor of, but which means we have a largish
list of nominees and therefore the potential for a largish influx of new
members in January, and possibly again the following year. My sense is that
we could still be better at on-boarding new members.
2. I feel like having Council be purely an elected body carries with it
both risks and rewards. The reward is clearly the periodic influx of new
ideas and perspectives. The risk is that we lose expertise and continuity
when Council members rotate off—and sometimes they rotate off for reasons
like they forgot to submit a statement, or didn't read their email. We
don't do a very good job of continuing to involve interested contributors
after they've left. We say that new members don't have to be
super-technical, and that's true, but there *are* wizard-level technical
and conceptual components to the TEI and we need to have people who can
manage them. As an aside, I'd like to see a push for making it *much*
easier to do things like build the Guidelines, but I think we have enough
on our plate at the moment.
So what could we do to mitigate the risks and amplify the rewards?
I've mentioned in the past that I'd like to see, besides the elected body
of Council members, a group of committers who serve in much the same way as
Council members but are there because they've been appointed and are
willing to contribute. Committers might be subscribed to the Council
mailing list, participate (as available) on teleconferences, and come to
F2F meetings (perhaps subject to budgeting). They would be identified as
Committers by the TEI—i.e. they would be listed on the website and could
put it on their CVs. There's some precedent for this, of course: we've
drafted Lou in the past when he wasn't technically on Council. My point is
that, while former Council members don't lose their commit privileges now,
they do get removed from the Council list, and are not included in meetings
anymore, nor are they recognized in any way, so they lose the incentive to
continue to contribute, with the result that they stop. That's not to say
that people can't just serve their time on Council and then move on to
other things, but that valuable, interested contributors should have a
means to continue their work and should be recognized for doing so.
Does this sound in any way sensible? What should be the benefits of being a
Committer? How would they be appointed? What role(s) would they play?
Should they be former Council members, or could we draft anyone (provided
they have the ability and desire to contribute of course)?
What do you all think? Obviously this would involve some rule changes and I
assume we'd have to involve the Board, etc...
