in reply to
Re: An Ephemeral God
in thread An Ephemeral God
I agree, and the fact that it's temporary is no comment on his worthiness. Here's what I said about the matter on the gods' wiki:
He seems to be highly motivated to work on the place, and I see no reason not to trust him. On the other hand, the same can be said of people we've made gods of in the past. Motivation comes and goes.
So, I propose that we add him to gods for a month. It will not be an appointment for policy decisions, but development work. He should document each thing here before he does it, avoid the SQL prompt, and work within the patch system. At the end of one month, he will be demoted, unless he asks for and receives an extension.
Amongst his tasks would be to create a Tailors group, to allow select individuals to apply patches, and to implement the expiration mechanism described below for usergroups. Then he will be placed in the Tailors group.
I think that we need a system of development which better utilizes motivated people, and which accounts for the fact that people don't remain motivated forever. Back in the day, vroom trusted me enough to hand me a set of keys to the place, because I wrote some nodes about what I'd like to do. I did a lot of stuff, because I was fired up about it. Now I'm not. So it goes.
Temporary appointments of trustworthy people to lead pmdev seems like a good idea. This particular appointment seems like a good first step.
The "expiration mechanism" mentioned is a simple idea, which probably deserves its own node. Basically, it seems to me that we would do better to have a system in which group memberships were temporary, but easily renewed. So, for instance, a pmdev member might have to visit the pmdev node once a year and click on the "Renew" button in order to remain in the group.
The details of this are not firm, and I'm sure you can imagine any number of variations on the idea. But basically, temporary memberships would make an easier decision of adding a person to a group, and allow us to remove inactive members without risking offense.
We will put any such mechanism up for discussion before enabling it.
