Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: Resignation from AFFS committee

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 13:46 +0100, John Seago wrote:
> I, on the other hand, am concerned with what 'should' happen, I expect 
> decisions made, whether they conform to the rules, standing orders etc., 
> or not; to be recorded, (together with the names of those arriving at 
> them), at the very least, so that they can be struck down, confirmed or 
> revisited later.

This actually does happen. I'm not going to claim that we minute our
decision-making process outside of meetings - that clearly doesn't
happen. However, we *do* record it. We are able to revisit decisions at
a later date (& have done on a number of occasions), although I don't
think we tend to confirm them at the next meeting. 

The reasoning for this out-of-meeting decision making is essentially
that we don't meet particularly often; once a month at most. It is
sometimes in person, more often by telephone and (in the past) IRC. We
obviously can't leave all decisions to those meetings (although, I don't
think anyone is seriously suggesting that we should do).

I'm not sure minutes are appropriate to our day-to-day decision making;
the question would then arise "what constitutes a decision?". But, on
the other hand, there is no reason why decisions which would be recorded
at actual meetings to go unrecorded simply because of the forum in which
they were raised. There's also not really any reason to not make the
output of that process generally available (actually, there are valid
reasons - for example, when we agree to help out with something that
hasn't yet been announced - but I suspect they are infrequent).

And, I would add that I think that this appointment is a special case.
Kevin said he thought that decisions related to structural matters
should be recorded: that's probably true, but to be honest I've never
seen AFFS committee has having the role of deciding how AFFS should be
structured. I also don't think committee should have a role in deciding
the make-up of committee. 

Perhaps (and this is really a topic for AFFS-Project if ever there were
one!) we should have a discussion about exactly what information people
would like to see coming out of committee. I've never really thought
about it, because there didn't really seem to be a demand for it. If
there is a demand, there's not really any reason why we can't change the
way we make decisions.

So, I'm trying to say that it's not quite as hand-wavey as it sounds. We
have established procedures for bringing matters to committee, and for
deciding them on a record. We can and do revisit decisions. 

Cheers,

Alex.