The PC has 16 seats. Finding eight qualified people will be doable. Finding 16 qualified people, capable of hitting the ground running, with a conference 4 months in their future to plan, would be untenable. It takes a non-trivial amount of time to recruit and organize that many folks. I'm not crazy about this being written into the bylaws, but in practice, its the most efficient approach and probably the one that would have been taken in any case. The other issue is, when looking at the current composition of the PC, there are at least 8 qualified, dedicated people. The idea of moving the PC to a be more representative of the operational and infrastructure community is a good one. The PC has, in the past, been too heavily weighted towards vendors and ex-Merit folks. Appointing 8 new folks will move the PC in the direction that the community wants to take. I don't think we should be worried about the "power" of the SC. Instead, we should be concerned about being able to effect the necessary changes that the community wants - a more representative PC, better talks on a wider and more interesting range of topics, etc. Part of this will involve changed to the mission of the PC... - an expectation that each PC member will actively recruit/present/moderate at least one quality session per conference. - expanding the scope of presentations to include new (to us) topics such as those related to providing VoIP services, hosting, access networks (DSL/Broadband/Wireless), network security, MPLS VPN scalability and interconnection issues, etc. I'd rather have a great talk on WiMax (IEEE 802.16-2000) than a bad talk on BGP any day. - Finding ways to inject the material we've seen in recent BOFs into the plenary or tracking sessions. The BOF material has been the most innovative stuff due to a relative lack of oversight combined with a freer format. - Maintaining and expanding the educational aspects of NANOG's mission through tutorials and other sessions. PC folks who are ok with this, old or new, will be able to contribute to and lead this effort. (BTW, for those responding or posting to this thread or others which are similar, please include a "non-op" tag in the subject line so that folks who don't want to read about political machinations can procmail us efficiently) - Daniel Golding On 6/21/05 3:03 AM, "Steve Gibbard" <scg@gibbard.org> wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, Hannigan, Martin wrote:
Ultimately, the SC is elected to represent the membership and carry out it's will and that should be uniformly actionable across the board in order for the SC to be taken seriously by the group and by Merit.
I'm not sure what you mean here.
It means that it doesn't make a lot of sense to handcuff the SC out of the gate on a supposition that they will do 'something bad' to the PC.
Anyhow, it's a window dressing handcuffing. Looks like anyone can be removed with a 5 to 7 vote of the SC. You've all read the revised Charter, top to bottom? Kind of makes 6.2.1 ceremonial. It should be removed based on that alone.
As the charter is currently written, every future steering committee will be stuck with a specific half of the program committee, left over from the previous year. The first steering committee gets to decide which of the current program committee members are in the half that they're stuck with, so they're much more powerful when it comes to program committee selection than any future steering committee will be.
[snip]
-Steve