Re: [gentoo-project] Council discuss: overlapping council terms of two years

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 7:01 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o> wrote:
>> I am against the idea of having single people being able to easily
>> make (possibly totally unfunded) decisions that affect Gentoo full
>> project wide.
>>
> I wonder why this works so well for other distros.

I'm not aware of any large community-based distros that work this way.
 It might work this way with a corporate-funded model, in which case
the guy in charge is typically appointed by whoever is fronting the
cash to run the operation.  In the end if it works out or not the
people who gets hurt or rewarded the most are the people who put the
guy in charge.

The other model that tends to work this way is the start-up model
where one person comes up with an idea and everybody else signs up to
follow them.  That is the Linux Torvalds or Daniel Robbins model.  It
is very hard to convert an organization to that model if it isn't
already running that way without doing a fork, which is just another
way of turning an established project into a start-up.

Gentoo already has a project lead model, which we should continue to
foster.  In fact, most issues should be resolved by a team with a lead
selected from the team.  I think this actually happens the vast
majority of the time - we just tend not to take so much notice when
things are going well, and things only go to the council when that
model isn't quite working.

I don't really see a need for the council to be making decisions in an
instant.  They should only be involved if a decision lacks consensus,
and if a decision lacks consensus then it really should get a
reasonable amount of discussion.  That doesn't mean that the council
should feel paralyzed either.

Finally, I think the council should have discretion about what it
talks about.  If there is a community-sponsored GLEP39 change and they
want to vote support for a resolution telling all the devs that they
think that only an idiot would vote for it, then they should be free
to do so as long as they don't interfere with things.  The council is
basically the highest court when it comes to technical decision making
for the distro and while they should refrain from micromanaging they
shouldn't really be constrained from doing much of anything.  If we do
view them as the "CIO/CTO" of Gentoo then I'd just look at my
situation at work.  The CIO is very unlikely to walk into my office
and ask me what I'm doing, since that is a waste of everybody's time.
However, if the CIO did walk in I wouldn't get very far with an
argument that he had no right to be there.

Rich