Re: [Tech-board-discuss] Re: [Ksummit-2007-discuss] Re: Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Elections

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 03:59:09PM -0700, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> Ever watched a legislative assembly at work?  A bad idea perhaps, but 
> the best that has been discovered so far.

Sure, but a Debian mailing list where fanatics who have no job, no
life, but huge amounts of free time to post literally hundreds of
messages a day indulging in Debian's "last post wins" style of
argumentation have far more power to influence the decision making
process than those who have to work at a real job has very little in
common with a legislative assembly.

That's why any kind of election for the TAB should happen, IMHO, in
"real space", at some conference where there is a gross filter of
people being able to afford travel expenses or be paid by some company
for their expenses (thus showing that someone felt that they were
doing enough good work that they should be given the resources to pay
for travel expenses and the conference registration fees).

If that's an elitist attitude; I plead guilty --- Linux and OSS is
*not* a democracy.  Linus doesn't obey the whims of majority voting to
decide which patches to accept or reject.  The Linux kernel community
is very much a meritocracy, which is why I don't believe that some
kind of pure democracy such as using the SPI voting membership is the
right thing for electing the TAB.  Just remember, in the United
States, a democracy where around 50% of Americans believe that Saddam
Hussein was personally responsible for 9/11 elected George W. Bush to
the US presidency.  It's statistics like that which make you want to
impose some kind of comptency test on who is allowed to vote.

The kernel summit is one such place where we can hold such a vote, and
if people thought that a BOF at some conference like Linux.conf.au or
OLS would be a better place, those might be other alternatives.  I'll
note that most of this discussion is mostly moot, though, given that
at this point we have 5 candidates for 5 slots, for positions which is
really more about service than about any kind of power or benefits.

       	    	    	      	      	     - Ted