On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 6:54 PM, Tim Peters tim.peters@gmail.com wrote:
[Larry Hastings] ...
However, once appointed, Elders are appointed is "for life". The only way to remove one would be for them to voluntarily step down--there would be no mechanism to remove one from office. (Perhaps this is too strong--perhaps one could be removed by a unanimous vote from all other Elders?) I want the Council to be immune to popular opinion, to be empowered to do what they think is right without fear of anything beyond negative public opinion.
At the time the US"s founders drafted the Constitution, mean US life expectancy was about 35 years A Federal judge only had to maintain "good behavior" to keep their job, but I imagine they expected most judges would die within a decade or two regardless.
That's not really true -- life expectancy *at birth* was ~35 years, but mostly because so many people died as infants/children. If you survived long enough to get nominated for a judgeship, then by that point your life expectancy wasn't too different from what we're used to today: https://passionforthepast.blogspot.com/2011/08/average-life-expectancy-myth....
But I think there are a lot of differences between a 21st-century F/OSS project and an 18th-century federal government, so probably not the most relevant model in any case. And of course it's always tempting to start inventing neat rules and procedures, but IME those details are actually the least important part of project governance (compared to things like, having a healthy discussion culture, tools for building consensus, etc. -- by the time you're voting on something you've already failed). So debating the pros and cons of term limits seems a bit premature to me right now :-).
-n
-- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org