I just read this thread tonight; well, I pretty much agree that SC’s decision should have as much continuity as possible, even if all SC members are changed for the long-term roadmap. (e.g free-threading is quite long-term project from the view of whether we will promote this project as one of the official distributions or not, I hope that we will have the same consistent decision even after few years later )
some voters might be more conservative in their vote, and would prefer to vote those who has experience being in SC, which basically is “problem #2” you mentioned above.
I agree that people have preferences when we have to vote on committee members (even for me), but the problem is there are no natural-born SC members.
This issue is already happening not only for the SC but also for the real world where we live, most of tech manager has experience of early failure, every tech interviewer has failure experience when deciding candidates should be up or not. so I think that we should observe how outside models solves this problem.
Here are some ideas without considering it is realistic or not.
For decision consistency, some companies have kinds of leadership principles that will help people make decisions without reference. So maybe we may need kinds of SC principles; if the principle is outdated, we can revise the principle when we think that is needed.
For the experience issue, the shadowing program will help people who want to get experience of the SC decision process. I am not sure how many people want to participate in the shadowing program, but if it is possible, it will be helpful to people who want to get confident when they become SC members one day.
(Of course, those participating in the shadowing program cannot directly or indirectly influence decision-making, and if necessary, may be required to sign an NDA not to disclose information outside of internal discussions. So, because of this, it is questionable whether it is realistically possible in the current situation. Because I also have no SC experience…)
Resigning from responsibilities is generally a difficult decision because you’re disrupting other volunteers’ work, especially if the team is only 5 people nominally.
Edit: sorry, I realise I’m responsding to an old post. I’ll shamelessly blame Discourse for that!
I don’t have time to make a more substantial contribution to the discussion, but I’m not sure there’s a real problem to solve here. Rather there is worry that it might be a problem, and I think we could safely wait until the problem manifests before solving it. (YAGNI.)
Agreed, and looking at Hugo’s nice graphics, it’s pretty obvious that we have always had enough overlap to guarantee continuity.
Note that more important than keeping people in power, is having documentation of the processes they use and proper handover. In my experience, this is far better than trying to achieve continuity by having people do longer terms.
fwiw, in the year and a half since starting this discussion, my own thinking has evolved, and I tend to agree with the comments that we don’t need to solve a theoretical problem that we haven’t actually saw in practice, and that if we end up with elections where the entire presiding council is replaced - maybe there was a good reason for that.
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