Incumbent bias in elections / impose term limits?

As was clearly evident from the 2022/2023 special election, there is a strong incumbent bias in the election process that should be addressed by the AB with some expediency.

The AB should really put term limits in place (e.g., you can only serve 5 years total on the AB), otherwise we just end up with the same people getting re-elected over an over again - even after they've taken a break from the AB.

That’s not the say the re-elected folks are not great (and you all know that I deeply respect all of you), but it does mean no new ideas/people come through so we just end up with the same ideas/people over and over again. In the long term, that's not a good thing for the community/w3c.

It also means limited chance for new people to get trained up in, or elected to, the AB. So, maybe consider reserving one or two slots for new people. Excluding myself here and meaning no disrespect to the re-elected AB members, looking at the great list of new potential candidates that ran in the last election, it's extremely sad and such a missed opportunity for our community that none were elected.

This should probably be a separate issue, but there is also a significant gender imbalance on the AB. It would be great if the AB could consider putting in gender quotas or some other system that ends up with a make up of genders that is more reflective of society (and not reflective of the the tech industry, where gender equality is extremely bad/harmful). We should be aiming for better and should do more to get there. Again, in the recent election, we had almost had a fairly equitable gender split. It's a shame that that was not reflected in the end result.

No file or test is named. Start by reviewing the current AB election and term-limit provisions in the W3C Process documentation, then separate the term-limit, new-seat, and gender-balance proposals. Done would require a decided scope and an agreed process change.