[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] Policy regarding the inactive members

[Denis Dupeyron]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 7:16 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o> wrote:
> Hello folks,

Hi Markos. A small detail first. You shouldn't cross post as it makes
things confusing and often results in threads splitting. I have no
problem with that because my email client merges threads but it's not
the case for everybody.

> Looking through the Council project page, the policy regarding the inactive
> council members doesn't look optimal to me

If you look at the summary of the last council meeting you will see
that I was tasked to start discussions on rewriting GLEP 39. I have
gathered input from various sources and will start posting the
discussion topics real soon now. One of them is about voting by email
which impacts the slacker rule. Your email will be particularly useful
for the discussion of that topic.

> 1) He is inactive in critical discussions ( such as the whole Phoenix
> discussion ) for a certain period of time

This is an interesting concept but finding a metric to gauge activity
based on mailing list discussion is very difficult for two reasons.
You use the example of the Phoenix discussion as one where council
members should have posted to show their activity. However, although
you consider me active you may have noted that I haven't publicly
participated to it. This doesn't mean I don't care or don't have an
opinion on it. But, and this is the other reason, much of the work I
do is done in private. Not that I want to hide anything but I read
threads and based on what developers and users say I ask questions,
advise, (re-)motivate, or connect people, etc... And I do that in
private because it doesn't make much sense to have those conversations
on mailing lists, and also because you guys already see enough of me
there.

> 2) Fails to accomplish his role by supervising the Gentoo projects. Remember
> we have plenty of Gentoo projects nearly dead and there is no way for us to
> participate since contacting the project leaders is a no-go. Indirect
> question: Is the council aware of the status of all projects? Shouldn't it
> be since he is responsible for them?

Another hard one to find a metric for. Beyond that, when I wrote my
manifesto for last year's elections I talked with other developers
about the possibility for the council to "audit" projects on a
volunteer basis. By audit I meant and explained that the council would
closely look at a project at their request and offer advice on short
and long term operation. This wasn't well received at all, to the
point that I didn't even bother adding it to my manifesto.

It seems that project leads like to consider their project as their
own little corner of Gentoo, and don't like too much to be interfered
with. I'm personally OK with that. One of the reasons is that we rely
on volunteer manpower and you can't force a volunteer to do anything
(s)he doesn't want or like or (s)he'll leave. You have to be very
careful when interfering with their work and find the right balance
which will change from one situation to the other.

One example I remember is when last year the kde project was
considering going forward without a lead. It isn't technically a
top-level project so it isn't required to have a lead. I thought that
in the case of such a large project it was a bad idea to not have one
though. I wanted to force an election but decided I would wait for the
right opportunity to make it happen as smoothly as possible. Jorge
will probably confirm that there was no arm wrestling involved. Making
such things happen without hurting anybody and stepping on anybody's
toes requires a lot of thinking and planning. From the opinion of a
lot of devs it's about as far as one should go. By the way this is
probably the kind of "leadership" Ben was referring to in his recent
thread, although I didn't mention it there as I don't like bragging
about these things.

> I feel sorry to admit that the current council failed to become a good
> leader for Gentoo and his inactivity demotivates both users and
> developers

I partly agree with you. I considered resigning last year when I saw
the disaster from the inside. Ferris convinced me that the right thing
to do was to stay on and do my best to keep things working and change
them when necessary. Which I'm still trying to do, but right now I'm
not sure I'll run next time.

Denis.