[oe] progress on OE organization issues

[Phil Blundell]

On Sat, 2009-05-16 at 10:48 +0100, Richard Purdie wrote:
> I have what I'd hope are some valuable contributions I can make to OE
> technical decisions since I know details of the deep inner workings,
> have some idea why things are as they are and have experience of
> improving OE, sometimes in invasive ways meaning I know what works and
> what causes problems. I'd really like to provide these contributions to
> the project but I don't know where in the structure I can do that? In a
> board of 5 or 7 people, is there room for the various people with
> experiences who still wish to help the project but also allowing new
> blood in and leaving room for the people who are more active on the
> project currently?

Yes, I was thinking about this too.  I don't think it's going to be
realistic to have the committee include a representative from every
single speciality field: it would just get too big and unwieldy to take
any decisions.  I feel fairly strongly that 7 people is the maximum size
we would want to have, at least to start with, and with that constraint
it's inevitable that some points of view will miss out on direct
committee representation.

However, it's worth remembering that the committee wouldn't be taking
decisions in a vacuum and that they would be perfectly at liberty to
seek advice or opinions from other people to inform their deliberations.
Indeed, I would very much hope that they would seek input from the
external stakeholders who'd be affected by any given decision.  Plus,
given that the committee would (I hope) be operating in a much more
transparent way than the existing core team has, you'd be able to see
what was going on and, if you thought something had been overlooked,
bring it to the attention of the relevant committee members.  Obviously
you need to have a little bit of faith in the committee to do the right
thing but, if they consistently fail to deliver on that, one would
expect that they'd get voted out of office next time the opportunity
arose.

p.