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

[Wiktor Wandachowicz]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:

> 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.

While I'm not a developer, I was thinking along similar lines some time ago.
Or make it like a year ago? Good leadership is important in many undertakings
of the real life, including (but not limited to) open-source projects.

After some time spent using Gentoo some comparisons against other known
projects naturally came to my mind. Linux kernel, Debian, PCLinuxOS - they
were first to think about. From these I concluded that in some brilliant
cases a project with a strong leadership, not fearing to make unpopular
decisions sometimes, progresses ahead nicely in the long run. From the
aforementioned three, Debian with its social contract, goals and the way it
is maintained is an exceptional phenomenon. It seems to me that the key to a
success lies in a good, respectful leadership, trust and good communication.

I'm sure that at least some of you read kerneltrap, but this recent topic
concerning NetBSD future (or lack thereof?) has some sad truths in it [1].

While I do not fear end of the Gentoo project (far from it!) I too sense
some lack of a general vision of where is it going now. Not delving into
philosophical considerations of democracy vs dictatorship I feel that the
current democracy approach Gentoo utilizes makes sense. But there are many
examples of healthy democracies, where citizens are seriously involved in
the process (western Europe countries, in general) as well as weak
democracies, where even though the process exists citizens feel powerless
(like in some new democracies in eastern Europe countries).

I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders,
developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible
page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project
leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision?
I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places?
And if it doesnt' exist I am convinced that it should be created, say, for
2007.0 release at least. Ubuntu has such plans, for one, so all developers
and users are able to learn what to expect from the upcoming release.
It also serves as a check list of what the expected goals were and what the
outcome was.

Maybe I should raise such concerns to the User Representatives first, but
the overall flow of ideas was IMO rather worth to be sent to the mailing
list in a complete form. If you feel otherwise, I apologize.

With best regards,
Wiktor Wandachowicz

[1] NetBSD: Founder Fears End Of Project
    http://kerneltrap.org/node/7061

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