Open meetings

[Guy Steele <gls@THINK-AQUINAS.ARPA>]

At both the Common Lisp meetings and the ANSI C meetings I have
attended, it is clear that something like 60% of the people are there
not really to contribute but to monitor the proceedings on behalf of
their companies to make sure they don't miss anything.  (While they have
votes, they vote in very predictable ways, often with each following a
"leader" they perceive as having similar interests. Mostly it makes each
company feel good to think that they have a vote that could help to
defeat some outrageous proposal.  In practice their votes have little
effect.)

It may help, in proposing a technical committee, to re-emphasize that
most of the committee discussions will be held by network, and all
interested parties will, in effect, have access to complete transcripts
of meetings.  Therefore not having a representative on the committee
doesn't imply lack of access to information.  (Got that?)

We will also have to have some kind of formal mechanism from the start
for distinguishing between "well, all the committee members seem to have
agreed on issue X" and "the following is the result of an official vote
of the technical committee and will be included in the next set of
language changes".  We don't want people trying to track the meeting in
real time to feel that they were misled about which way the committee
was going to jump.

--Guy