RSS Advisory Board

Update: This proposal was withdrawn on Feb. 24.

The following RSS Advisory Board proposal has been made by member Rogers Cadenhead and seconded by Randy Charles Morin.

Under the board charter, this begins a seven-day discussion period so any interested parties can comment on the proposal. (The best place to comment is on the mailing list RSS-Public.)

When that ends, the board will have seven days to vote on it.

Proposal

There's been a lot of public discussion about the RSS Advisory Board this past weekend, and some of it has been about whether the group's truly representative of the RSS development community.

Some of the comments are making me uncomfortable, because I know there's absolutely no desire among members of the board to control RSS, own RSS, or get an advantage for a particular company. People joined because they thought it was a way to pitch in and help.

I'd like the board to expand to 15 members so we can bring on more people who have a stake in Really Simple Syndication and a desire to help out with matters such as the spec proposal and other ways to make it easier to implement.

I've received a few requests to join from people who'd be good to have on board.

The following procedure would be used to choose new members:

1. As board chair, I'll take e-mail requests to join for a week and put up a list of everyone who asks in, with a sentence describing their background.
2. Applicants will be asked to post on RSS-Public about why they'd like to help.
3. Board members will each choose three people from the list.
4. The six applicants chosen most often will be invited.

You might consider changing that to a +1|0|-1 vote, with each existing board memeber getting only three +1 and three -1 votes (or perhaps more, depending on the number of applicants).

Votes are simply tallied, so folks with the highest score get chosen, though only applicants who received at least one +1 vote are eligible.

Yes, this is a popularity contest, same as you proposed, but including negative votes will avoid 'false positives' for highly controversial applicants (ie. an applicant with three +1 votes and two -1 votes will score lower than someone with two +1 votes and no negatives).

This is superficially similar to an abbreviated 'Identify the Champion' pattern, so you might consider just going full bore with it:

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