Re: [gentoo-council] RE: [gentoo-nfp] Foundation by laws: new Article V

[Alec Warner]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Chrissy Fullam <musikc@g.o> wrote:
> Combining emails from antarus and wltjr as in some ways they seem to share the same view, focus on the team that needs it and don't split focus, but I'll hit antarus' other points first.
>
>> c) Limitations of Power.  This bylaw limits the damage done by one
>> person.  It is SOXish; it takes two to tango; two people to be
>> malicious in some use cases.
>
> Iirc, no one person can take action without some kind of peer vote?
>

I tried to address this with my 'Treasurer' point; as in it is not
clear to me if as the Treasurer I can take action legally here.

>> d) Past performance does not indicate future returns.  Just because we
>> have not had troubles in the past with this does not mean we will not
>> have trouble with it in the future.
>
> So instead of looking at Gentoo's past performance we'll look at the 'what ifs' that have never happened and we've no reason to think they'll ever happen? I feel like I am putting more trust in our developers/community than others are.
>

Using past performance is very similar to using 'what ifs', in my
mind.  We have no hard data on past performance because it is quite
subjective and not all data is available (eg problems that may have
occured but were not made public).  Just like with the stock market
you take a risk in using past incidents to forcast future risk and
make decisions.  I think our data here is poor and the risk is too
great.

>> Your use case is invalid in the general case as funding requests of
>> any kind require majority approval by the board of trustees per:
>> http://www.gentoo.org/foundation/en/requesting-funds.xml
>
> This actually furthers my case. "Any Foundation money spent needs to be approved by a majority vote from the Board of Trustees." So one person cannot do it alone so where is the conflict? The Foundation/Trustees have been around for I believe four years, in that time only once has a person held over lapping roles. Why do we think suddenly every person on Trustee may overlap? It seems so very unlikely. And even if they did, that means that we voted for them to fill the role, so do we now not even trust ourselves to cast the right vote?
>

None of the use cases I presented required that every trustee overlap
(which I concede is very unlikely); they just require one person to
overlap.  I also presented a case where that document could be ignored
because it is not legally binding in my opinion.

>> >  What is the reasoning that a person cannot serve on the technical
>> > team and the legal team?
>>
>> If something happens to said person. The loss is greater. If the drop the
>> ball, the loss is greater.
>>
>> There is no reason anyone should have such broad focus. They pick an area
>> focus on it and work on it. That people take on/eat to much, then fail to
>> chew it is not ok. Thus this is designed to prevent that from occurring.
>>
>> Just like Jacob should have had backup. There should be more recruiters,
>> more people on QA, etc. Until ever little detail of every job is being
>> done to perfection. There is no need to stack titles, or widen focus. We
>> need more narrow focus and doing a better job all around.
>
> So do we also restrict people from being on more than one team? What if one team is deemed to be 'not doing well', should they resign from other teams to focus on that one team, or resign from that team so it doesn't drag down their efforts on other teams?

I am primarily concerned about the trustees affect in meatspace; the
fact that they may be signatories on legal documents and I would
prefer they make being a trustee a very high priority over their other
duties.  I concede that this is not a very strong point and we do not
enforce it in other groups.

>
>
> Kind regards,
> Christina Fullam
> Gentoo Developer Relations Lead | Gentoo Public Relations
>
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