Re: [gentoo-dev] Democracy: No silver bullet

[Luca Longinotti]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:11:52 -0500 Lance Albertson
> <ramereth@g.o> wrote:
> | I partially agree that a strong council will help the situation, but
> | the problem with any leadership-by-committee model is the lack of
> | quick decisions. Many times things come up that need a quick
> | resolution (when I say quick, I mean within a few days). And if you
> | have a committee of 7 or so people that live in several different
> | timezones, its extremely hard to get them together to discuss it all.
>
> Mmm, afaics there's nothing preventing the council from having quick,
> 'as needed' informal interim meetings with whoever happens to be around.
> If a few people aren't there, it's not as big a deal as if people don't
> show up to the monthly meetings. Heck, the monthly meetings could be
> considered a minimum...

Indeed. I have to agree with Ciaran here, a stronger council seems to be
one of the best solutions. A (benevolent) dictatorship, or the opposite
of extending the democracy level even more, aren't going to solve
anything imho. The dictatorship model sure doesn't motivate volunteers,
and having more than one person is anyway better, as already pointed
out, to not have single points of failure, or potential for quick and
big damage. The opposite of a total democracy too doesn't cut it, when
anyone starts having the power to put stuff to vote, make up referendums
etc., things start to slow down and get caught up in endless bureaucracy
(I'm swiss, it happens there, often, not that it isn't a good thing for
something like a nation, but for something the size of Gentoo, and with
the scope of Gentoo, it would just hurt imho).

> | The council has its merits, but it also has its weaknesses, this one
> | being one of them. I think I mentioned 6mo ago that we could keep the
> | council, but select one person to sort of be the "operational lead"
> | to make quick decisions so that development moves on.
>
> What happens if he or she (ok, he) isn't around? Is the flexibility of
> having a single "on the spot decision" leader enough to outweigh the
> disadvantages over allowing mini meetings?

The ability of the council to hold arbitrary mini-meetings when needed,
and eventually change the decisions at a later date (with a time limit
of course, so that people can start doing work, and at the same time
don't do too much work for it to then be eventually refused) if there is
extreme opposition (basically if you have only 2 members around, those
decides "YES", and the other 5 then tell "NO NO NO!") would seem the
best course of action to me. Having the "one council leader" doesn't cut
it, as Ciaran already mentioned for reasons of availability, and again
we'd introduce a possible "quick" point-of-failure. If there is a
decision that needs to be done extremely quick, just get together the
council members that are there and do it, although I wouldn't expect it
to be commonplace to have decisions that affect the whole of Gentoo that
need to be taken in like an hour or two, at least 1-4 days of time to
"prepare" for the decision can always be required, thus allowing the
council members to be there in a reasonable amount for those
mini-meetings, and if not, but if they know they want to say something,
there still are proxies that can act for them.
Raising the number to two co-leads can also be a solution, but what if
exactly those two are away for whatever reason, but the other 5 are
around? Now do they have to wait on one of the aforementioned two people
to do anything? That still is a possible point-of-failure, which the
other model (who is there decides, who is not does not) would solve
relatively well.

-- 
Best regards,
Luca Longinotti aka CHTEKK

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