[ghc-steering-committee] GHC steering committee status

[Simon Marlow]

I think Simon intends the spreadsheet to be the source of truth for votes
by committee members, because he wanted something more explicit than just
silence to indicate "I have no strong views on this proposal". FWIW I think
it's reasonable to expect *some* action by committee members for each
proposal. I'm not wildly enthusiastic about the spreadsheet because it's
another thing separate from github and email, and it's a bit manual for my
liking, but happy to go with it if that's what people want.

One disadvantage of the spreadsheet is that it's not as transparent as the
other mechanisms we use for this committee (email and It should probably be
visible to all and linked from the docs on github?

Cheers
Simon

On Sun, 10 Sept 2023 at 03:36, Moritz Angermann <moritz.angermann at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Simon,
>
> I think this is a good idea!  Is my understanding correct that this is for
> record keeping by the shepherd only? It is not sufficient for steering
> committee members to go over the proposal and just fill out
> accept/reject/recuse in their respective column? Emails are still the
> authorative events?
>
> Cheers,
>   Moritz
>
> On Sun, 10 Sep 2023 at 10:07 AM, Simon Peyton Jones <
> simon.peytonjones at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ghc-steering-committee mailing list
>> ghc-steering-committee at haskell.org
>> https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-steering-committee
>>
> _______________________________________________
> ghc-steering-committee mailing list
> ghc-steering-committee at haskell.org
> https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-steering-committee
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-steering-committee/attachments/20230911/19c15617/attachment.html>