Yes, it is and I don’t claim to have a solution. As you surely have noticed I’m not saying LAS members can’t be on the board. All I’m saying is LAS member should not automatically qualify based on that fact.
Here’s a summary response on a few items you brought up.
a) It is tough - regardless of the number of previous “boards”. So I don’t think it’s relevant if there’s been 0 or 3 or 7 before. As you said yourself, they all fulfilled a different purpose.
b) There’s no certain criteria or particular skill set etc I could think of that qualifies some one for being a useful member. I think to come up with a “wishlist” or job description or “selection process” is part of the process we’re discussing here.
c) It’s not that I have to be happy with a/the criteria; the most important thing to me is that whatever happens, whoever is on that board and whoever makes the decision on who is on that board it all happens in the open and is transparent.
d) Just for the record, I write CFML pretty much every day, not necessarily 10h per day, but I use it. And just this fact certainly doesn’t qualify me to be on a board like this either.
If I was to come up with a list of “wanted” skills or interests for someone to join a board like the, I’d probably initially start with:
- Needs to know and use CFML well
- Needs to know other languages as well as other language paradigms at least reasonably well
- Needs to have an opinion and is not solely a “yes man” person (sorry, I struggle to describe it better)
- Needs to look beyond their personal interest (“I always wanted a tag or attribute for this and that because I have a use case”) and go for the architecturally better solution.
- In a perfect world has done language design and specification work before
And I’m sure that other people have additional suggestions and I’m sure that people will disagree with my criteria.
From a selection process there are various options. You could go with the extreme basis democratic way like in Switzerland and have public voting of the Lucee mailing list members. You could go the other extreme and make it a closed door decision of LAS members. Both have obvious pros and cons and I think the reality will be that it’s gonna be something in between.