Hi Nemo!
Thanks for your comments. Please note that the last call period is over, and the charter has been officially adopted on Wednesdays. I mentioned this in the Radar email yesterday. I'll send out a separate announcement today.
You wrote:
Daniel wrote:
This finally gives the committee a clear place in the "chain of command", and real authority over software development at the WMF, where it formerly had none.
This is a compelling argument, but why not call it Wikimedia Foundation Technical Committee then? It would also be easier to clarify that it's mostly/only meant for WMF staff and whoever else decides to submit to its process (this is already implied by phrases such as "developers or teams"), rather than for MediaWiki in general.
The charter does not reduce the committees scope from what it was before, it expands it. Also, it does not reduce authority, but expands it.
Volunteers are by definition only subject to processes they decide to submit to. The new charter changes nothing for volunteers. However, with the new charter, WMF staff is now subject to TechCom decisions, based on the CTO's authority. This was not the case before.
P.s.: Not commenting is not necessarily a choice. For instance, the talk page doesn't use wikitext and therefore creates selection bias for the discussion.
Well, using wikitext is also a barrier to many, so that would also create a selection bias. Even using computers creates a selection bias. Seriously - we are talking about developers. I expect they are able to use a thread based discussion board as well as they can use wiki syntax. And if they totally hate flow, they can just reply to the email.
Regards, Daniel