From: Frank Gevaerts <frank_at_gevaerts.be>
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 16:58:12 +0200

On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 03:30:29PM +0100, alex wallis wrote:
> Hi list.
> I was just reading about the rb steering board on the wiki even though
> i new about it already, and one issue that hasn't been addressed, and
> yet i think an important one, is that of rotation of members.
>
> I think that possibly members of the steering board should not be allowed
> to sit twice on the board in consecutive years, as 2 years is a very long
> time especially in rockbox, also if the members of the board were rotated
> this would mean that there were always fresh ideas coming in, and also it

As far as I see it, the board is not really about "fresh ideas coming in",
it's (among other things) about keeping bad ideas out, and I'm not convinced
that rotating changes anything there.

> would avoid the board becoming a kind of dictatorship where you have the
> same members for 5 years continuously. Obviously that situation would not
> be healthy. The americans change there president at a maximum of 8 years

Great example :) Does it help them any ?
Actually there is a real important difference : if you don't like it,
you can go away while actually keeping the software. It has happened
before in free software : if the leader gets in the way can't be removed,
everyone else will leave and start a new project. The other difference
is that the RSB is not a "leader" as such.

> for that reason. So I think a person should be able to sit on the board
> an unlimited number of times, as long as it is not consecutively. but
> there must be rotation to avoid stagnation.

I disagree. If someone does a good job, let him/here keep doing it. If
not, and enough people agree with you, there is this thing called
"voting"

Frank

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan

Received on 2008-07-01