Appointment of Board Members.

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 01:01:35PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger at gmail.com) said: 
> > 
> > Elected representatives have a duty to listen to people, even when they
> > don't like what's being said.  And they have a duty to tease out the facts
> > from those messages.
> 
> I understand what you're saying, but there are often times where there's
> not a lot of facts in the messages, or what facts that there are are
> obscured by requests that are completely infeasible.
>
For the updates proposal I tried to do something that I felt would be useful
by summarizing and organizing the ideas presented in the threads so that
things that were being repeated could be pointed out and information
wouldn't be lost.  It didn't work out too well for a few reasons:

1) People wanted to use the summaries as a way to create proposals instead
of simply summarizing the conversation.  I encouraged this at the time but
I think it was a mistake -- we really just needed a forum to show that
everyone's ideas had been heard.

2) I started too late in the game.  I had already read a large amount of the
thread before thinking of doing this.  At that point, it was not only
tedious because of repition by the email authors but also because of having
already read the thread once.

3) I wanted to participate.  I think that being good at summarizing a hot
issue is best done by someone who can stay out of the discussion.  Once you
get involved you second guess whether you're skewing your version of the
summary (no idea if I actually skewed it or was just afraid that I was going
to).

4) Probably because there were proposals popping up, FESCo started the
process of reviewing the proposals and bringing them to a vote.  I saw the
summaries as more a means for making sure that everyone's ideas had been
presented in a reasonable, intelligent way but the time pressure of an
actual proposal going before FESCo meant that people were very anxious to
reiterate their strongest arguments and get their ideas down as a proposal
before FESCo voted on something.  It became like trying to summarize
political ads the night before an election.

I think there's potential in doing this so I might try it again sometime.
Maybe the next time I hear about a thread-o-doom via IRC before I've
actually read any of it, I'll give it another shot.

-Toshio
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