Hi Dave,
I had considered running for Board, but wasn't sure if I could live up to the time commitment. I was debating with myself if run, right up until the application deadline passed.
For Council, my choice was easier. Doing council work seems to be challenging work. I applaud those who do it. For me, it's not so much the time commitment, but the mental CPU cycle requirement (to read up and understand proposed protocols/changes). I find that a difficult thing to do. In my caffeine-deprived head, these cycles are in limited supply. I, somewhat selfishness, like to reserve that for the other projects that I'm working on.
It might not be the _best_ excuse for not running, but that's mine.
I totally get that. Also, I think it was somewhat easier to do Council when one could skim the mailing list for comments and discussion.
The Standards list is (I think) a lot quieter than it was. Back in my early Council days, I could rely fairly heavily on the community to raise any objections, and therefore concentrate on deciding which objections seemed both important and unanswered - and of course also inject my own review of those aspects that were important (only!) to me. Now, it feels more like the Council have to rely on their own review considerably more, and the community comments seem (again, to me) to be scattered amongst chatrooms rather than conveniently in a handful of mailing list threads.
So yes, Council is hard, and I think harder than it used to be as well, and I think that's a perfectly understandable excuse for not running.
Dave.