wanted: motu-sru members

[Jordan Mantha]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com>
wrote:

> > Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> >> What is the benefit of 2) ? Can't the MOTU team do the selection in the
> >> voting?
> >> If there's some people motu-sru would remove, I would hope for the MOTU
> >> team to
> >> remove them too in the voting.
> >
> >     The large benefit of allowing the existing members of motu-sru to
> > select amoung the volunteers is to ensure that the team works well
> > together.  If there is a removal with which MOTU disagree, such
> > objection ought be raised in response to the motu-sru publication of
> > the candidates.
> >
> >     While I can't be entirely sure, I suspect there will be time
> > between the publication of the slate of candidates and MOTU Council
> > configuring the appropriate polls for selection.
>
> I am strongly opposed to pre-selection.  We have had cases in the past
> where a non-transparent pre-selection process resulted in a very limited
> and from the perspective of at least a significant slice of the community
> very unsuitable set of choices.
>

I'm also opposed to opaque membership processes, *however* I also think that
current team members are in a good position (in most cases, IMO better than
MOTU-at-large) to judge candidates. I personally think if MOTU are just
going to pick random people because they've heard of them or something, then
we're better off having MOTU SRU making pre-selections (not final
selections).


> As an organization consisting largely of volunteers, the legitimacy of our
> management teams comes from the fact that MOTU have selected them.  Once
> there is a pre-selection, this legitimacy is lost.  If someone volunteers
> that might be problematic, I think that we should trust the MOTU to do the
> right thing.  Personally, I'm not at all opposed to MOTU discussing the
> advantages and disadvantages of various candidates.  That would, of
> course, include the current motu-sru.  I believe that whatever concerns
> there may be that consider motu-sru to want pre-selection, I think that
> with some constructive discussion as we move to a vote the can be managed
> transparently in an effective way.
>

Well, I'm not sure if legitimacy is neccesarily lost. Some is I suppose is,
but the team members are still MOTUs so the question is really whether a
subset of MOTU should do some selection or whether the whole thing,
top-to-bottom, should be handled by MOTU-at-large. Ideally I would like the
entire MOTU team deciding teams but issues I see are:
  * many MOTU don't vote in the first place. I don't believe we've ever
gotten over 50%. Most votes during MOTU Meetings are 4-8 people.
  * historically I don't see where we've been able to comprehensively vett
people without devolving into a flamefest.
  * time consuming. Giving time for comments, time for nominatiions, time
for voting, etc. can easily make the process of getting new members take at
least 1 month.

Perhaps we can put some things in place to mitigate these issues.
/me crawls back under his rock.

-Jordan
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