Re: [gentoo-project] On the way Devrel is constituted

[Samuli Suominen]

On 20/06/13 05:03, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 8:50 PM, Alexis Ballier <aballier@g.o> wrote:
>> On Wed, 19 Jun 2013 22:18:49 +0200
>> hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Who controls devrel?
>>> Simple answer: no one.
>>
>> And this is good IMHO. Judiciary should be an independent power.
>
> The council is elected.  No sane organization (democratic or corporate
> or whatever) just has a self-appointing judiciary.  I'm not convinced
> we even need an independent judiciary, but nations that have
> independent judiciaries still have elected representatives appoint
> them.  They also often have a means for elected officials to overturn
> their decisions (at least in the direction of pardons).  Lifetime appointments
> make sense when you're talking about basic laws and civil rights which
> change on a timespan of centuries, but not when you're talking about a
> computer operating system distribution that changes on a scale of months.
>
> Corporations have elected boards appoint executives who appoint the
> members of HR/Security.  Democracies elect representatives who appoint
> members of the judiciary.
>
> My feeling is that QA and Devrel should be council appointed.  They
> can of course recommend their own members, and Council can give
> whatever deference they feel is appropriate to the recommendation.
>
> If you wouldn't trust somebody to appoint QA/Devrel members, then you
> shouldn't be electing them to the Council.  Likewise, if you wouldn't
> trust somebody to not just seize control of the entire distribution
> (infra, DNS, bank accounts, the Gentoo name, firing the Council, etc)
> you shouldn't be electing them to the Trustees (a few years ago our
> sole remaining Trustee was contemplating basically just turning the
> entire distro over to a benevolent dictator (our founder), who legally
> wouldn't be accountable to anybody including the Council (or even the
> devs in general depending on whether the bylaws were modified)).
> These are real governing bodies that essentially have all the powers
> you don't want to give to anybody (well, save unelected QA/Devrel team
> members) whether you like it or not (at least within the boundaries of
> the Foundation charter/bylaws).
>
> I agree with hasufell's recommendation, although I would extend it to
> QA as well.  QA and Devrel are "special" projects and should probably
> be accountable to the Council.  I think they should be largely
> self-governing much as infra is (even though infra is fairly dependent
> on the trustees for funding/etc).  It isn't about control so much as
> accountability and mandate.  I'd of course recommend that the Council
> should be hands-off as long as things are going well, and there really
> isn't anything that suggests they wouldn't be (certainly this has been
> the trend with both the Council and Trustees).
>
> Part of me is thinking that we should just write up this proposal as a
> GLEP and go from there.  By all means devs should register their
> opinions on it as it firms up, and we can leave it to the new Council
> to decide how to handle it.

I agree (to every point)

The way devrel can be seen now when enforcing a decision without the 
council authorization gives automatic impression of an group of 
individuals trying to blackmail you, instead of the impression of 
distribution trying to push you into correct direction.
Like, for example, if devrel had been council elected back when we had 
the ChangeLog debacle, we wouldn't have had a ChangeLog debacle.

- Samuli