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

[Donnie Berkholz]

Stuart Herbert wrote:
> On 8/24/06, Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@g.o> 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.
>
> We've had a global vision for where Gentoo is going from before I
> joined - Gentoo is here to create a source-based distribution where
> each package is as close to what $UPSTREAM intended it to be as
> possible.  We're not trying to take $UPSTREAM packages and innovate
> with them - we're here to do a first class job of packaging them up.

A distribution is more than just an entity that packages upstream 
tarballs. I agree with your point, but it misses a large chunk of what 
we do.

If this is the Gentoo vision, then why are we even doing anything else? 
We've already reached our only goal, which is packaging stuff, and all 
we need to do is bump it.

People need to feel that Gentoo is _moving forward_, that it's actually 
going somewhere.

> Scaling wasn't the only issue.  There were too many topics -
> especially when it came to servers and web-related issues - that were
> just beyond Daniel's experience and understanding.  You also left Kurt
> out as one of the lieutenants.

OK, sure, add Kurt to the list for the record. But that's not really 
part of my point.

> That hierarchy was always flawed.  Server-related matters never had a
> seat at the top table, and ended up being represented by the base
> systems manager.  That actually turned out quite well for us, because
> folks simply left us alone to get on with things.

Then why wasn't the hierarchy fixed? Instead we somehow ended up in this 
huge metastructure debate and changed everything around.

>> 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_.
>
> Except ... even today, folks simply aren't empowered to vote on every
> decision (other than by voting with their feet).  Your hypothesis
> seems to be based on a flawed model of how Gentoo works, I'm afraid.

"Official" votes, sure. But what about GLEP discussions on -dev? That's 
the only way anything major ever happens, and it might as well be a 
requirement for a unanimous vote among all ~350 developers. The only 
time I can recall even a single dissenter before a GLEP moved on to the 
council was brix on Sunrise.

>> The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other
>> developers being happy with any given situation.
>
> This is hardly a new phenomenon invented by Gentoo.  You'll find
> tonnes about this under topics such as "growing pains", and also
> "management by ego".
>
> The basic cause always comes down to weak or non-existent management.

Yes, and that's exactly my point. We need stronger management.

>> 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.
>
> I'm not sure how you can justify that statement.  To the best of my
> knowledge, that system has only been tested in full the once - when
> Brian was suspended from the project and Ciaran was expelled.

That in itself is proof enough. There were numerous instances where it 
_should_ have been tested but wasn't, because of all the hassle required 
to do anything.

>> 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.
>
> Can you back this up with three examples in the last twelve months
> where this has happened?

Any long debate where more than 25% of the posts came from a single person.

> Our problem is that we have a critical mass of groups who do not share
> a culture to bind them together, and drive them to overcome their
> differences.

I'll agree with that.

>> 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.
>
> Hrm.  Where is this lack of respect for devrel being displayed today?
> What forms does this lack of respect take?  If there's a lack of
> respect at the moment, it's not for devrel.

How about in Gentoo's complete inability to do anything about the 
constant trolling and people acting like assholes? We say we're about 
courtesy but we don't (can't?) do a damn thing about it, because it 
requires a huge, convoluted investigation and trial and nobody's willing 
to waste that much time.

I know this is partially changing, but I'm unsure that any group outside 
of the council will ever be trusted to suspend or kick people out.

> A good way to sort that out is to get them together in the physical
> world, and use group de-polarisation exercises to help folks
> understand that their view of the world isn't the only view that is
> valid.  This is why I'm hoping to see Gentoo establish a regular
> international dev conference.  You'll find that the vast majority of
> issues won't arise once folks actually know each other better - and
> the personality clashes that are left are easier to see for what they
> are.

Some Debian developers commented on my blog about how valuable DebConf 
was for this.

> I'd also argue that we're _not_ powerless.  It wasn't pleasant, but
> the old system has shown that we can deal with genuine trouble makers.

Barely, and with enormous effort ...

>> 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.
>
> We don't have a democracy.  Gentoo is largely a workocracy (there must
> be a better word for it ;), where the vast majority decisions are made
> by the folks who actually do the work.

Only the small-scale decisions.

> Folks don't vote on stuff.  To pick a recent example, none of the
> folks who opposed Sunrise actually had any means to vote to prevent it
> happening.  What they had to do was to lobby the council, who were the
> only folks with a vote.

Oh, gimme a break. Screaming about it on -dev for hundreds of posts 
isn't just equivalent to a vote, it's better. It makes people think 
there's more than 2 developers opposed to it.

> If we had actually tried a democracy (something I'm instinctively
> against, but rationally am becoming more and more interested in), your
> arguments would maybe carry some weight.  But, the clear fact of the
> matter is that we haven't - and that leaves your arguments built on
> sand.

Untrue, voices make a democracy.

> I'm naturally suspicious of anyone who seeks office on a platform of
> talking about the need to beef up the powers of an unelected body (ie
> devrel)

I'd rather get rid of devrel altogether (at least its conflict 
resolution role) and have the council deal with this.

You say "unelected" like it's evil. In a company, nobody gets elected, 
but a hell of a lot of work happens.

> You've just lost my vote.

What vote? I'm not running for anything, and I have no desire to do so. 
I'm just trying to get people interested in fixing Gentoo so it's not 
stuck in the mud.

> I'm not standing for election, but maybe someone who is would be
> interested in investigating some ideas Sejo discussed with me when he
> left us.  The summary is my own; hopefully I've captured Sejo's ideas
> accurately.
>
> *  Every staff member has to belong to a team.  You join a team by
> being voted onto the team by the other members of the team.  They
> don't vote you in, you can't join.
> *  If you're not part of any team, your rights and privileges as a
> staff member are automatically terminated.  There's no place to go to
> appeal.
> *  You can be voted off the team at any time.  The teams are self-managing.

The goal?

Thanks,
Donnie
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