Making decisions

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

So far, I've received votes from Steele, Bawden, and myself on proposals
1 - 4.  The rest of you are encouraged to vote, whenever you are ready.
Since we couldn't agree on voting rules, no decision will be announced
until I've heard from ALL of you.  However, I don't think that this is a
viable policy for the long run; any one person could bring the whole
process to a halt, just by not reading mail for a while.

I've received Moon's mail pointing out how far behind he had fallen in
mail-reading and suggesting that we take 5 - 10 weeks to make decisions.
Those of you who have caught up on Common Lisp mail have seen that I
just took some steps to limit the volume of mail on random side-issues.
I don't know how well this will work.

Feedback on that or other procedural matters is always welcome.  I would
prefer to make group decisions on issues of this kind, but in the
absence on any feedback from the rest of you I will do what I think is
necessary until I am either deposed or I can't take it any longer.  I'm
not going to sit back and watch this whole thing unravel for lack of
decisive leadership.  If you think I'm out of control, I would be
delighted to turn this job over to someone else.

I have received no suggestions from anyone after my reply to Moon in
which I pointed out that we have a lot of issues to cover and asking
what kind of pace for the decision process might get the job done, while
not disrupting people's schedules.  I can't tell if you people are
waiting to see how the current process evolves, if you've given up on
the whole thing, or if you're all so far behind in your mail reading
that none of this has reached you.

I've received word via KMP that Moon and Rees disagree with the pace I'm
setting on the public mailing list.  This is not my favorite way to get
feedback.  If you're unhappy, please tell me directly.

I'm hoping that we can agree on a reasonable decision-making procedure
and pace by mail, or perhaps by face-to-face discussion in Boston.  I
guess there's no time when we could all meet in Boston to discuss this
among ourselves.  I'm sure I'll be seeing some of you one-on-one and
maybe we can work out some of these problems then, if you're not reading
mail in real time.

The reason we've got such a backlog of work is because we have gone for
two or three years without any offical decision-making mechanism.  Now
we've got one, supposedly: this committee.  We really do need to decide
things this time around before they unravel again.  There's no point in
doing all this work to get issues into some kind of decidable state if
we're not going to make decisions.

-- Scott