[gentoo-dev] Democracy: No silver bullet

[Donnie Berkholz]

I just posted this to my blog [1], but I know you don't all read it so I
wanted to post it here as well. Do read all the way through. I very
rarely write anything this long, and when I do, it's something I feel
very strongly about.

I started my fourth year as a Gentoo developer in June, and Gentoo's
changed a lot since I started back in 2003. We've become a drastically
more democratic organization. But the question remains — _Is this a good
thing?_

When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy
years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on
the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we
can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on
pretty much whatever they feel like.

When I joined, Daniel Robbins was in charge, period. Seemant Kulleen and
Jon Portnoy were basically his lieutenants. What Daniel said was what
happened, and woe to anyone who angered him. This generally worked out
pretty well, but _as Gentoo grew, it didn't scale_. Everything
significant still had to go through Daniel for personal approval.

Shortly after I finished training and became an "official" developer,
Gentoo gained its first real structure via Gentoo Linux Enhancement
Proposal (GLEP) 4 — "Gentoo top-level management structure proposal".
The GLEP process itself was quite new then; GLEP 4 was really only the
second proposed GLEP (the first two were details related to the GLEP
process) and the first one that was accepted. _Its goal was to improve
communication and coordination as well as increase accountability_.

GLEP 4 formalized a hierarchy of so-called "top-level" projects —
between 5 and 10 major areas into which everything in Gentoo could be
divided. Daniel appointed the original project managers, who served
under him.

Democratic elections entered Gentoo when we realized that we needed to
create a new top-level project for all the desktop work, because it
didn't fit into any existing project. Since managers already voted
amongst themselves on GLEPs, it seemed like a natural extension for them
to vote on a new manager. The call for nominations is archived online.
I'd been a developer for around six months at this point, and by then I
was the lead X maintainer. Brandon Hale was active in maintaining window
managers and other miscellaneous applets and such. Turns out that the
vote tied, so we became co-managers.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of a very
slippery slope.

Gentoo used to be a courteous, friendly development community where
nobody was afraid to speak his mind for fear of insult and injury. I see
a clear correlation between the growth in democracy and the departure of
courtesy. Once people are empowered to vote on every decision, rather
than just having their discussion taken as input in a decision, they get
a lot more vehement, argumentative and forceful about getting their way.
_Flamewars and loud arguments going on for hundreds of posts have become
commonplace, despite the occasional outcry_. Here's one such outcry, on
March 20, 2006, to the private developers' list:

 What I've seen for the last 18 months or more is a general degeneration
 in the attitudes of developers for their fellow developers. When I
 joined, the attitude of people was friendly and welcoming. I screwed
 up a couple of times. I didn't get my ass handed to me. I got picked
 up, and comforted. And taught and tutored. ...

 So, we split from the Gentoo Technologies company, to a community owned
 Gentoo Foundation. And now everyone was empowered. Everyone has a
 voice. Some louder than others. The unfortunate thing is that with
 this empowerment came a bit of assholishness. With rare exception,
 we're pretty much all guilty of that. Someone makes a spelling error in
 a commit, and that leads to flamefests on irc and mailing lists and
 blog entries. And so on, ad nauseum.

 Frankly, I'm sick of it. It's burning people out. We're burning
 ourselves out by being this way. It's time to stop this shit. To
 everyone reading this, you've arrived at the important bit. From now,
 please try this little thing. When you're on the mailing lists or the
 fora or irc channels or in /query or somehow in the gentoo 'verse,
 please try, just try, to be a little bit nicer to the people with whom
 you're interacting. That's all. Have a little respect (even if not
 deserved!). Listen a little. Hold back the snide comment, the
 sarcastic remark. I don't mean to get all Oprah on you all, but I hope
 you see my point -- just be nice for a change.

The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other
developers being happy with any given situation.

The problem got so bad that our Developer Relations team wrote up an
etiquette guide. Unsurprisingly, the same vocal minority that generally
behaves like an ass and violates said etiquette guide erupted in flames
over it, and it ended up fading into an existing but largely irrelevant
piece of writing.

Around the same time, more cries of "Democracy!" and "Eliminate the
cabal!" forced developer relations (devrel) to come up with a huge,
bureaucratic, court-like system for disciplining pretty much the same
group of people again. Everyone treated it like a world of extremes of
good and evil, where democracy is absolutely good and purity, and
anything other than that is evil. This added bureaucracy has essentially
rendered this side of devrel powerless, meaningless and useless.

All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming more
influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about its
members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun
and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.

How can we do anything about this? As people such as Mike Auty have
pointed out, the problem could be with the increasing barrage of rules,
regulations and policies to which we're expected to adhere. Take a look
at the FreeBSD committers' rules. Rule one is "Respect other
committers," and rule two is "Respect other contributors." Take a look
at the importance of courtesy and care to avoid creating long-term
disagreements in rule one:

 Being able to work together long term is this project's greatest asset,
 one far more important than any set of changes to the code, and turning
 arguments about code into issues that affect our long-term ability to
 work harmoniously together is just not worth the trade-off by any
 conceivable stretch of the imagination. ...

 First calm down, then think about how to communicate in the most
 effective fashion for convincing the other person(s) that your side of
 the argument is correct, do not just blow off some steam so you can
 feel better in the short term at the cost of a long-term flame war. Not
 only is this very bad “energy economics”, but repeated displays of
 public aggression which impair our ability to work well together will
 be dealt with severely by the project leadership and may result in
 suspension or termination of your commit privileges.

Or how about the Ubuntu Code of Conduct? The first two rules are "Be
considerate" and "Be respectful." Again, note that these rules are
actually enforced. As has been pointed out on the Gentoo development
list, you can have respect without courtesy. But Gentoo needs both! One
just isn't good enough.

But what about Gentoo? We don't have any overriding principles like this
from which all of the standards for behavior derive. Instead, we have a
large document explaining specifically and in detail what's allowed and
what isn't, and even that is ignored. Because of the bureaucracy and the
lack of respect for devrel's role, we're effectively powerless to do
anything when people behave in a way for which the FreeBSD project's
leadership would kick them to the curb.

I'm not the only one to suggest that a democracy isn't the most
productive way to run Gentoo. When people wanted to change in how Gentoo
was run, democracy was the only option considered, rather than simply
changing the leaders. There's an ongoing assumption that if problems
exist, it must be somewhere in the structure rather than in the people.

If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
to do anything about it.

Thanks,
Donnie

P.S. -- if you want the links, you can get them from my blog post.

1. http://spyderous.livejournal.com/80869.html