Re: [gentoo-devrel] devrel meeting etc

[Olivier Fisette]

On Tuesday, 6 September 2005 12:19 pm, Deedra Waters wrote:
> The only thing i really
> want to change, is that i think that a commitee of say 3 to 5
> people handles a complaint from beginning to end.

I am very surprised that you suggest merging the investigative 
and judiciary branches of devrel, and I am firmly opposed to 
that. It was discussed and agreed upon that having the same 
persons fulfilling both roles was a conflict of interest and 
should be avoided whenever possible. Michael's proposal, which 
we voted on just a few months ago, was all about this separation 
of power, and Paul just illustrated why having someone both 
policing and judging can lead to abuse.

You now suggest going back (in some ways) to how things were done 
before, even though devrel was blamed for the way the last 
incident was handled, and even though the separation of devrel 
in two groups was suggested to help avoiding abuse and lack of 
transparency. The reason you give for undoing this change is 
having two separate groups is too complicated. You say this even 
though the system has not yet been tested for more than a few 
months, and even though you said yourself that this whole 
procedure is very seldom needed, and thus does not require an 
important amount of the developers' every day work.

As for the suggestion that the council is there to appeal should 
devrel abuse its power, I would rather we design our structure 
to make it work correctly in the first place rather than rely on 
someone else correcting our mistakes. An appeal to the council 
should be considered an exceptional procedure, and if the 
council ever has to overrule devrel, this would imply devrel has 
utterly failed to do its job properly. (And devrel would be in 
for another well-deserved backlash.)

Regards,

-- 
Olivier Fisette (ribosome)
Gentoo Linux Developer
Scientific applications, Developer relations