From the recent email traffic, it sounds like there is a concern over
At the risk of sticking more than just a toe in water I've not been in a REALLY long time : ) and because I enjoy kicking over beehives -- How about a halfway step between vesting a subset of the community with authority or continuing to try to run everything through a whole group....? Would someone be willing to pull together a committee or two of volunteers (of necessity including a few of the usual suspects like the Release Manager) that at least are recognized as being willing to stay on top of some things, and pull things together. tracking things and too much needed to be followed/organized/etc by the same folks. I'd suggest, rather than the generic Technical Committee, something more specific -- I much prefer any committee to have a defined output/responsibility, rather than just meeting for the sake of meeting. Accepting Chris's thought the idea that the "Committee of the Whole" (the list & IRC participants) is the ultimate decision making mechanism, I'd say try to get some folks be step forward handle some specific functions as support to the process. Namely as... - an RFC Wrangling Committee, which would meet minimum once a month (just to check in) and/or within some set time period of new RFCs coming it (as in triggered by). The volunteers for this would maintain the RFC list, and assign states to things ("needs more info","for discussion","in progress","in code","fully incorporated" for example). The community can then use that state list to drive the overall agenda. This would make sure nothing gets ignored or forgotten. This should have a Senior and Junior Wrangler identified, who would help keep things focused - but would preserve broader community say in things. - a release committee (effectively exists now anyway) - which would be the developers and whomever else they feel is needed to define the Next Koha Release, juggled as it is now by current Release Manager. This gang should be left mostly alone by the "Whole" to worry about day-to-day/immediate questions. It might be worth trying to get a new volunteer/victim to be the next release manager very much in advance of the release date... that way, the general/scheduling discussion can get settled for the next release much sooner - without stressing out the "sitting" release manager. Call it the "prospective release manager" job, maybe? That way you get someone who'll be thinking about the long term but who'll have to live with that long term in the deliverable sense. As a further thought... If the volunteers for Senior and Junior Wrangler are in widely separate places, they could meet with subsets of the RFC group - which would be open meetings of course- on IRC, if desired, with less timezone headache. Does any of that help? Nick