[ghc-steering-committee] GHC steering committee status

[Simon Peyton Jones]

Dear GHC steering committee

Re GHC proposals I was talking to Simon M about

   - Making the shepherd's job easier and quicker
   - Providing a way for members of the committee to say (explicitly) "I
   don't have an opinion about this proposal" and thus recuse themselves.
   Explicit recusal is better than "silence means assent" because silence can,
   and often does, mean "I'm under water and not listening".

With that in mind, I want to revive my suggestion of running an online
spreadsheet
<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e6GdwHmAjeDEUhTvP-b18MDkpTfH3SMHhFu5F3nDIWc/edit?usp=sharing>to
describe the state of proposals that are in our active purview.  That is,
I'm not proposing to show proposals that are under discussion by the
community, or accepted etc -- just the ones that are in our inbox, *where
the next action is ours.*

That makes it much easier to see our current inbox, without looking back
for Jocahim's last email and then adding deltas for all the emails since --
which I cannot do in my head.

Specifically, I have *a column for each committee member's vote. * That
should make it easy for the shepherd to see who is yet to express an
opinion, which I always find difficult.

As I say above, I am very uncomfortable with "silence means assent" for any
but the smallest proposals.  *I suggest instead that if there is a proposal
where you feel unable to offer an opinion, due to lack of expertise, or
lack of time, you can say "recuse" meaning that you explicitly want to
stand down from this particular proposal.*   (Somehow "abstain" carries a
connotation of conflict of interest or something, but it amounts to the
same thing.)  If you are too  under water to even recuse yourself, maybe
it's time to step down.

So in columns F to O we should see explicit responses from every committee
member, in a timely way.

Joachim doesn't like spreadsheets like this because they can easily get out
of date.  But it must be better than manually trawling email. *And it is up
to each of us (not Joachim) to fill in our own column for proposals in our
inbox.*

If we don't like it, we can change it.  You all have edit rights.

I have populated it with data from Joachim's message of 2 Sept, but there
has been some action since then, so shepherds please update it.  This is
not Joachim's task!

Thanks

Simon
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