Re: [gentoo-nfp] drobbins can be nominated as a trustee

[Daniel Robbins]

On 1/31/08, Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote:
> One of my co-workers has a saying 'Trying things out is one of the
> best ways to see if a thing works'.  Just because he helped create the
> structure we have today doesn't mean that structure was success; then
> or now.  Much of this involves experimentation.  No one knows the best
> way to manage a volunteer group of this size and we have to have some
> sort of organization and we have to be smart enough and wise enough to
> know when a solution is not working and work to fix it.  Whether that
> means incremental changes or more sweeping changes; I don't think
> anyone knows ;)
>
> -Alec

You pulled me back into the conversation with this good point :) There
were certainly problems with Gentoo when I was leading the project,
but we were always looking for ways to solve the problems, and we
actually had the ability to make changes and try new things without
dealing with a ton of politics or roadblocks.

A lot of our challenges changing overall project structure or even
portage itself. Examples of this were the creation of an unstable
tree, the addition of "projects" within Gentoo, the creation of Herds,
tweaking how herds operated, etc, etc. We tested stuff and when things
were broken we tried to fix it. And we had the ability to try to fix
any aspect of Gentoo.

Also, your point about managing a volunteer group that is this large
is well taken. My current approach to solve this problem is avoid the
issue in the first place and work with smaller volunteer groups. I
think this "solution" is something that the future heads of Gentoo
should consider. With the software development tools that exist today,
much of this centralization can be avoided in the first place.

-Daniel
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