Update charter to concentrate responsibilities on the TSC rather than its voting members #1360
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…g members The only effect of this change should be that TSC regular members participate in lazy consensus process. If you see another effect that I overlooked, that's not on purpose, so please chime in. The aim of this change is to clarify that TSC voting members do not have any specific powers (except the ones defined by the Moderation Policy and the ones delegated by the TSC on a case by case basis) over Collaborators.
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I agree with this change. I feel like there should be a blurry to nonexistent line between voting and nonvoting members, to the point where everything can just say "the TSC". Maybe we calculate quorum based on the number of TSC members who have voted in the last three votes, and that's it; everything else is for the full TSC. |
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Just a reminder, in case someone is inclined to land this, that this cannot land without CPC review and approval. All changes to the charter need to be approved by the CPC. Once there's consensus, I (or someone else) can take it to the CPC. |
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It's a minor thing, but I would prefer the commit message and this PR title to refer to "responsibilities" (or something similar) rather than "powers". I would prefer language that focuses on the work and/or its impact, and not on power and/or status. |
aduh95
changed the title
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Given how old this is and that it has not (to my knowledge) been brought to the OpenJS CPC, and that there is no intention of bringing it to the CPC (to my knowledge, at least), perhaps this should be closed? |
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Why is there no intention of bringing it to the CPC? I'd like it to be. |
Ah, well, Joe Sepi and Matteo Colina are the Node.js voting CPC members, so if there is TSC consensus on this, they're probably the best candidates to put it on the CPC agenda. Personally, I don't fell like we should do this. It is well-intentioned, and clarifying limits to TSC voting members is fine, but this seems to elevate TSC regular members. But for better or for worse, the whole point of "regular TSC members" is to allow people to retain the TSC status without retaining authority and responsibility. (I know that's the whole point because I'm the one that proposed the status. It's also why the term "regular member" is not exactly intuitive, unfortunately.) Prior to the creation of the "regular member" status, we had people (in my opinion) game the system to retain their TSC role without actually being invested in the project. This (in my opinion) created and exacerbated all sorts of problems. Creating "regular member" status allowed people to not freak out about how being removed from active TSC status might affect their career prospects or whatever. So they could let go of being a TSC member (because they were technically still TSC members, even if they don't actually do anything any other collaborator wouldn't/couldn't do). The change proposed here kind of undoes that. Except for maybe Geoffrey Booth, none of the current Regular Members (including me!) are (as far as I know) sufficiently engaged that they should be considered stewards of the project to a significantly greater degree than other active collaborators. I don't see the advantage of granting them responsibility or authority beyond that of collaborators (other than that it makes "regular member" more intuitive, which I get, but unfortunately I think the surprising meaning of "regular member" is a feature, not a bug). All of that said, I consider this a decision for the voting members (like you!) to make and not the regular members (like me). So...just my opinion, and quite possibly I'm the only one that holds that opinion. (I don't feel great about it, particularly the way it makes "regular member" a misleading term, but we tried a few different approaches to addressing inactive TSC membership, and this was the only one that worked in my opinion.) Since I know someone is going to say some variation on "we can create measurable criteria and then automate removal of people from the TSC": We tried that. That's what I mean by "game the system" above. If people know they need to do to keep membership, they will do the minimum but it will not result in them being engaged. |
It's not the intention of this PR, the goal is to rephrase the charter so individual voting members do not hold power, only the TSC as a group does, I'm hopeful that it can be achieved without changing the status of regular members. If you have in mind some specific change that's problematic, please point it out, and let's try to find a better way for phrasing it. |
Ah! That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining. |
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The challenge I seen in having regular members participate in lazy concensus is that what happens when we discuss private issues and need to get consensus. Regular members are not on any of the existing mailing lists and are not currenty involved in private discussions. In some cases we even use email and or slack to be extra sure all TSC members have seen an issue so technical it might apply to non private issues as well. For the reasons @Trott mentioned I'd prefer not to create more work/process for what is a effectively a cerimonial title. EDIT: which I mention because of this at the start of the discussion
I have no issue with trying to have the wording be such that the TSC as a group as respresentated by voting members be where the power lies versus any one individual. |
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@aduh95 thanks for updating, added my LGTM. |
The only effect of this change should be that TSC regular members participate in lazy consensus processEDIT: this has been removed, this PR should not have any effect for regular members. If you see another effect that I overlooked, that's not on purpose, so please chime in.The aim of this change is to clarify that TSC voting members do not have any specific powers (except the ones defined by the Moderation Policy and the ones delegated by the TSC on a case by case basis) over Collaborators.