Re: Suggested response to the Yandex "cannot iive with loosening of TAG participation requiremens"

> On Apr 14, 2015, at 18:19 , chaals@yandex-team.ru wrote:
> 
> Hence inter alia my proposal that a member whose nominee holds a seat should not be allowed to propose another nominee. I'm not sure how clearly I expressed that - I know it was rough in my strawpeople because people asked for clarification.
> 

Happily, up until Mr Kardell’s recent message, no-one had suggested modifying that existing rule.  With luck, we can stay focused on the best way to handle the single case at hand: ‘change of affiliation of an existing elected TAG member, when their new affiliation already has a TAG member’.  

As I see it, we have three suggestions on the table:

1. the existing state: they must resign their seat and a new special election occurs
2. the proposal on the table: they may retain their seat, but at the conclusion of the next (annual, regularly scheduled) election, no two members may share the same affiliation
3. what I think Daniel prefers: they serve until the end of their elected term

Brian suggested a variant of 2, which is (as I understand it):

2.1: if at the next election they have (a) only served one year and (b) the other representative has also only served one year then they may stand for confirmation re-election to their current seat (i.e. for the second year of their term).

People will not be surprised to learn that proposal 2 was an attempt to find an intermediate point between the first and the last, and like all such proposals, it gets shot at from both sides… :-(

As I recall, the problems with 1 were
1a. Special elections are a pain, and they might occur quite close to a regular one
1b. The TAG has ongoing projects and forcing an immediate resignation may be disruptive to ongoing work.
1c. The representative may have only just got up to speed; this forces a restart with a new representative.

The problem with 3. was that the overlap may last for up to two years, and will average a year, which is too long for some people.

The motivation behind 2 was that the situation may well resolve itself at the next election, it completely avoids special elections, and the TAG has to be used to change of membership at the annual election cycle. For some, however, the maximum (1 year) and mean (6 month) overlap are still too long.


David Singer
Manager, Software Standards, Apple Inc.