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

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 3:26 AM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
> catching up on an overnight burst of traffic, responding to multiple messages.
>

[snip]
>> On Apr 13, 2015, at 19:27 , Brian Kardell <bkardell@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If there are people who get elected to TAG and switch employers after
>> some time, we should let them finish the term they were elected to
>> IMO.  I don't see anything in this which personally causes me to
>> question the institution - it seems like it will mostly take care of
>> itself if you have reasonable constraints on the elections themselves.
>
> No, sorry.  That could lead to a situation where a single company has more than one representative for up to two years, which is too long in my opinion. The furthest I was willing to go is up to one year.  If people cannot live with that, then I suspect we’ll end up having no consensus to change, which is that we’ll continue to require immediate resignation.
>

Apologies, when I wrote this I debated whether I should clarify 'after
some time' to avoid this ambiguity, but didn't because my response was
already lengthy and included subtlety about what members really want
and what's good for the Web.  I believe that some amount of TAG
stability is a good thing, with such a small team, it's not helpful to
have it regularly in election mode unless that is serving the
Web/larger wishes of membership and I'm not convinced that it always
is.  Two years is a full regular term, that means someone would
essentially be hired pretty close to immediately after election, I can
understand how such an extreme case makes some people uneasy.  A year
is a decent improvement if it means unless unable to participate for
some other reason (death, for example is a pretty firm one) we'd have
at most one TAG election per year. But...there is something to what
Daniel said which I think plays in...

> It's totally abnormal to force a resignation from someone
> who was elected, and it's a negation of ACs' sovereign vote.

I think that the rules are built to stagger elections and so the
proposed change would create a 'one year seat'.  Back to my point
about striking the right balance between all the things - could we
allow them to stand to finish their full term in that case?  If
membership thinks that by and large this is still the best pool of
talent and that it's the best move for the Web to keep them on TAG, it
does seem kind of wrong to me to fully disqualify them in what is at
best a gray area.  It seems highly unlikely that someone will sign an
employment contract on the day they are elected, it's just as likely
that someone would sign a contract 10 1/2 months in putting them just
outside the window, but not able to participate for the last month and
a half (according to verbiage they are supposed to cease).

Could you not craft something acceptable out of this?  For example
(snip below is just a quick, and I'm sure amateurish cut at it)
--------
Given the few seats available on the Advisory Board and the TAG, and
in order to ensure that the diversity of W3C Members and their wishes
are represented:

A Member organization is permitted at most one participant on the TAG
except when having more than one participant is caused by a change of
affiliation of an existing participant.  In the case of affiliation
change, the participant chose affiliation has changed may continue
participation until the next regularly scheduled election for TAG, at
which point they MAY stand in the special election to fill the time
remaining for their seat.

At the completion of any full term for the TAG, the Member
organization must have returned to having at most one participant.
-------


> David Singer
> Manager, Software Standards, Apple Inc.
>



-- 
Brian Kardell :: @briankardell :: hitchjs.com

Received on Tuesday, 14 April 2015 13:52:12 UTC