Re: Forming an Accessibility Steering Committee

[Aaron Leventhal <aaronlev moonset net>]

I agree that getting people to do their assigned tasks might be easier 
if there is a weekly meeting to report to.

Perhaps the balance we're addressing here is: focus vs. openness. Every 
community has to deal with that.

Does anyone have experience with a group that did it particularly well?

- Aaron

Brian Cameron wrote:
> Aaron:
>
>   
> > Okay, since so many people are interested, I have to play devil's
> > advocate now.
> >     
>
> Thanks, it's good to hash things through.  I'd say that since so many
> people are interested, we need to decide if we want a huge committee or
> whether it makes more sense to prune down the list (perhaps by voting?)
> to a more manageable group of people.
>
>   
> > What is the advantage of having a steering committee vs. just using the
> > mailing list? If there's a committee then by its very nature it is more
> > closed, and some people are left out. There will always be someone
> > deserving that isn't included.
> >     
>
> I don't think it is necessary that a committee be "closed".  As you
> say, there is no reason this mailing list and IRC meetings couldn't
> be used to work together in an open way.  One advantage of having an
> official committee with meetings is that people will likely feel more
> pressure to make progress on their assigned tasks before the next
> meeting.
>
> Perhaps we should do something like preface "COMMITTEE" in the Subject
> Line to emails to this list to indicate which emails require extra
> attention by people who are a part of the committee?
>
> In my opinion, the purpose of the committee is to provide a forum where
> we can more effectively come up with lists of tasks important to a11y,
> prioritize them, and find people willing to be responsible for leading
> progress on these tasks.  We should, for example, make sure that this
> list of prioritized tasks is clearly visible somewhere on the Wiki so
> that people who want to get involved can see what areas need help.
>
> Another idea is that I know that Sun has an internal bi-weekly a11y
> meeting.  I would imagine other distros do as well?  Perhaps it would
> make sense to have a single open meeting rather than having a separate
> meeting for each distro, and better make use of GNOME's collective
> resources?
>
> The current "ad hoc" method of doing things has worked reasonably well
> so far, but I think things would likely work better if we made better
> use of the volunteer community which seems quite excited to get more
> involved.
>
> Just throwing out some ideas of how we could make a committee workable.
>
>   
> > Open source processes like wikis, mailing list and bug data bases help
> > guard against accidental "closedness". This is a meritocracy -- the best
> > ideas come to the top regardless of who they came from.
> >     
>
> We should definitely strive to be as open as possible.  The more people
> who are willing to step up and volunteer to take responsibility for
> tasks, the easier it is, I think, to keep things so open.  Updating
> wikis, mailing lists, bug data bases, and such does take some effort.
> That said, it does seem that there are many people interested in
> volunteering to make a11y more successful.
>
> Brian
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>