[gentoo-dev] Re: Summary for 15 March 2007 special council meeting on CoC

[Duncan]

"Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@g.o> posted
20070315230215.GB28016@××××××××××××××××××××××××.net, excerpted below, on 
Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:02:15 -0700:

> * The motion was called for accepted the CoC with the above
>   modifications, as well as revisiting it next council meeting,
>   and reviewing the actions of proctors during every council meeting.
> - Passed 6 votes for yes, and 1 for abstain (vapier).
> - The document was committed to the council project space temporarily,
>   until a better location is found for it:
>   http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/coc.xml

The first discussion draft was fine for what it was, but needed a lot of 
work.  It's good to see that it got it, as the version linked above 
reflects that work.  Thanks, all involved and specifically the council, 
Christel, and the editors/contributors/reviewers.

Two things I don't see dealt with, a big one of immediate interest but 
should be trivial to correct, and a lessor issue, longer term, but will 
require some discussion to correct.  Also a third more general item for 
discussion.

* "If you perceive a breach of the Code of Conduct guidelines, let the 
proctors know."  How?  The council's email address is given for appeals, 
but no general proctor address is listed. (At least none that I saw, even 
after searching, so if it's there, it needs to be made rather more 
prominent.)  proctors@g.o a reasonable alias?  Mentioning it right 
after the above quoted sentence should work, I think.

(For clarity, it's also worth considering putting both the proctor and 
the appeals/council address in a Contact Addresses section of it's own.)

*  "To prevent conflicts of interest, Council members may not perform the 
duties of a proctor."  Great!  There is however one potential problem, if 
the summary post suggestion making current forum mods and etc proctors by 
default becomes policy.  That is, global mods have status as Gentoo 
staff, and if I'm not mistaken (it's possible there's a restriction I'm 
not aware of), nothing until now has prevented them from running for 
council if they decided to.  The implication here is that mods, as 
proctors, are forbidden from being council members (unless they give up 
their mod status, but if that's their only or single major role in 
Gentoo, that's asking them to do /nothing/ but be a council member during 
their council term, if elected).  Was that really intended?  Perhaps it 
was, but if not, maybe a clause enumerating that exception and specifying 
that they simply abstain due to conflict of interest (possibly with a 
designated participating in proctor decisions in their place, how is such 
alternative chosen?) should be proposed for addition.

*  Building on the designated alternative idea, what about altering GLEP 
39 (council) such that the next person down the list of candidates 
becomes the designated alternative voter, in case of councilor absence or 
conflict of interest, such as in the proctor case above?  This could be 
done in a couple of ways.  Either the last current councilor elected 
would become the alternative, and vote only in case of ties or as the 
alternative, or the next guy on the list could be taken, but without the 
tie breaking vote, only as an alternate.  There's also the question of 
whether the alternate votes in any absence, or only if the absent 
councilor didn't designate a proxy.  I'd say only if no proxy, except for 
conflict of interest cases, since the proxy then could be said to be 
tainted the same was, as he was chosen by the councilor with the conflict 
of interest.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

-- 
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list