Re: [gentoo-dev] Council manifesto of sping

[Arun Raghavan]

Hey Sebastian,

On 30 June 2010 06:15, Sebastian Pipping <sping@g.o> wrote:
> Arun,
[...]
>> And another one for "More direct democracy":
>>
>> a) How would you decide what questions go up for public vote and which
>> ones stay with the council?
>
> Good question!  I think a few voices from developers (say three)
> requesting a vote should force a global vote.  If the council were
> deciding on that, the concept would be useless.  At least that's my
> current understanding.
>
>
>> b) For questions like "- Should Python 3.x be stable?", isn't that for
>> team leads to decide? And for the council to resolve in case of
>> conflicts?
>
> It's too important to leave it to the Python team alone in my eyes.
> Previous threads have shown that consensus is hard to find on Python 3.x
> related topics.  A direct vote from all developers would reveal what the
> majority really wants for that topic.

It is my opinion that dismissing the opinions of the people who are
actually doing the work is not a good way to motivate the same people
(I don't even disagree with you about the Python team's approach to
3.x in the tree, but I disagree with how you think it should be
handled).

>> c) For questions like "- Should developer X be banned?", would you be
>> willing to do this if it meant a lot of washing of dirty linen in
>> public, or protracted flamewars (and other reasons why we have a bunch
>> of level-headed people in place to deal with this calmly and quietly)?
>> If no, where would you draw the line? If yes, how would you deal with
>> the fallout?
>
> I'm not understanding all of that, honestly.
> On a part I understood: Solving isues on that front may be worth extra
> "noise" as the goal is to noticably improve atmosphere after.
> Please help me to understand the rest of your question.

The problem is not noise. The problem is that an issue that needs to
be escalated to Devrel could not be resolved by the involved
developers or the people who were present at the time. Moreover, there
are strong emotions from the devs (and often their friends too), and
people will end up saying things that they may eventually regret.

Dragging this out in public /will/ polarise the community, result in
more public conflict, very likely without a complete picture of the
story on both sides being available. Devrel's purpose is to avoid
this, and I believe this does work (we can debate their efficacy or
how things can improve, but saying it doesn't work is unfair, IMO). I
don't see how your proposal would deal with this fallout.

Cheers,
-- 
Arun Raghavan
http://arunraghavan.net/
(Ford_Prefect | Gentoo) & (arunsr | GNOME)