Hi Joel, At 06:22 19-06-2009, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
John suggested in one of his notes that approving the current open-list change would be a distraction from evaluating his proposal. I would strongly disagree.
Having an open list fulfills our innate curiosity. If the open-list change goes through, it will delay John's proposal as the community will wait to see the results. These micro-changes, which may have major effects, have brought up questions about the process. There was a comment about whether a sentence in draft-dawkins-nomcom-openlist should have used a "must" instead of a "should". This highlights the frame of mind in reading that document. We are accustomed to using RFC 2119 key words in documenting protocols. Is this document a protocol or to put it differently, will we reach the best outcome by following a protocol?
Even draft-dawkins-nomcom-openlist has exceptions. In my opinion, this shows that we cannot craft narrow rules as we also have to consider the circumstances. Is there an ideal candidate for the opening? If there were, we would be choosing a stereotype which would prevent any change in the body from within. That can be good if we want to go on with business as usual. But that creates a disconnect between the community and the body.
The feedback from the community demonstrates that most participants keep away from process issues. We only have to look at the NomCom roll call each year to see that it is a particular subset of the community.
Regards,-sm
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