Infrastructure, was: Proposal: New web site maintainers

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

There are a couple questions I'd like to discuss with the other core
team members a little more before offering some concrete steps
forward.  Historically, the core committee has been in charge of
infrastructure for the most part, but this hasn't really worked as
well as I'd like.  We've seen issues like the recent problems with the
domain name expiring (my fault) but also difficulties in other areas
too.  I get the impression that changes have generally been cumbersome
because we all have so  much else on our plates.

However there is also a  basic question to the community:

What can we do to facilitate cooperation and contribution from the community?

I have a few basic ideas, still very poorly formed, but worth
discussing openly in the spirit of peer review:

1)  Would it be helpful to have a list for moderators of the web site?
 (Actual moderator status would, I think, need to be invite-only, but
it would give people a chance to get involved and show themselves
before we make such a decision.)
2)  Would it be helpful to have a list for people interested and able
to contribute to the management of the infrastructure?  Actual ability
to contribute in this way would still require invitation from the core
committee, of course.

Part of what I'm wondering is if it wouldn't be better to try to push
the role of the core committee closer to that of pure governance
matters and try to open up some of the infrastructure management to a
wider community.  Maybe we could have other committees for managing
the web site and other pieces of infrastructure on a day-to-day level
and free us up a bit.

Maybe this is a bad idea or maybe it is a good one.  But I figured it
seems like a good time to float it and see what other people think.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers