Re: Proposed Process Change Regarding TAG Participation Rules

On 10/31/2014 09:48 AM, Daniel Appelquist wrote:
> Hi folks - as some of you may know, we have had a special election in the TAG this year, necessitated by one of our members
> changing affiliation to an organization which already had a “representative” on the TAG. This has been a great distraction to
> us and has struck us as overkill, especially considering this is the second year in a row that an affiliation change has
> triggered a special election. The negative impacts include losing momentum, getting engaged in the distracting process of the
> election cycle and losing good people who are willing and able to put energy into our work. Compounded on top of that, we now
> have to put these seats up for election again in the regular election cycle.
>
> With all this in mind, we had a discussion on the TAG mailing list[1]  which concluded with a very positive process change
> proposal from precious TAG chair Noah Mendelsohn. This proposal is to relax the terms of participation in the TAG,
> specifically[2]. I would like to open up discussion on this proposal in this forum with the aim of amending the process (see
> proposed change below).

I'm in 100% favor of allowing the affected TAG members to participate until
the next election. That just makes sense.

I'm less certain of allowing multiple members from the same organization
at all times. To me, diversity of opinion, experience, and perspective is
more significant than diversity of any biological attribute, and, for example,
two people from the Chrome team are much more likely to have overlap in
their perspectives than one from Chrome and another from Mozilla or Microsoft.

This doesn't mean that opinions don't differ within an organization, but
that opinions are more likely to vary across organizations. Also people
who are absorbed into an organization will most often absorb some of that
organization's culture and perspective. For example, if you are hired by
HP to work on printing, you will start to care more about printing--if
only because you are thinking about it more, and exposed to the impact
of its problems more.

~fantasai

Received on Friday, 31 October 2014 17:07:53 UTC