Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Trying to become a Gentoo Developer again spanning 8 years...

[Rich Freeman]

NP already gave a good response but I wanted to elaborate on the
conflict of interest topic.

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 8:32 PM, Daniel Campbell <zlg@g.o> wrote:
> Additionally, we should think about conflicts of interest. Should we let
> people act on both the Council and in Comrel?

This has been a topic of several long discussions.  Personally I see
no conflict of interest, and it is common in the real world for judges
to serve on panels that decide cases, and also serve on larger panels
that handle appeals of the same cases.  A conflict of interest is when
somebody stands to benefit personally from the outcome of a decision,
apart from the organization they represent.  So, if somebody were
deciding whether to engage the services of a company they own on the
side, that would be a conflict of interest, because even if the
company screws up and harms Gentoo, they still benefit personally.

That is my opinion on the matter.  It seems like a majority of people
who have commented on this in the past disagree with me, and there are
a few places in the official docs that suggest that Comrel members
should not participate in Council appeals of decisions.  To date
Comrel members have recused themselves from Council appeals.  So,
while I think most of the community is wrong on this, and Gentoo's
standards are inconsistent with how most organizations and governments
are run, ultimately I don't make the rules (we Council members try to
follow the rules, and certainly I'd expect to be called on it if I
didn't).  Most in the community seem to prefer having the appeal be
handled independently from the original decision, feeling that a
second set of eyes could reach a different decision.  Certainly some
courts work this way as well, though I don't think any would call this
a result of a "conflict of interest."

> I recall certain
> situations call for council members to abstain from certain votes. Is
> that true of matters involving Comrel as well? QA? There are multiple
> "pits" of power, and I think we as a project should do what we can to
> ensure that powers between groups don't become imbalanced as one or a
> small group consolidate power among themselves and use it as a weapon.

To date Comrel members have been recusing themselves from Council
appeals.  I personally disagree that this is necessary, but all the
same the result is that all Council appeals to date have been
independent decisions.

In any case, anybody who is in both Comrel and Council is only on the
Council because they were elected as such.  So, they already have the
trust of most of the community.  I don't personally get why you'd
trust them with the bigger decisions and not with the smaller ones as
well, but...

The other challenge with having completely separate
Council/Trustee/Comrel/QA (and I'd throw Infra in as one of those
other special projects) is that ultimately there are only so many
people that have that level of trust/maturity/leadership/etc in the
community.  I think it is healthy to try to minimize overlap just from
the standpoint of getting more hands involved and not letting one
person become a bottleneck.  Nevertheless, I'd rather have somebody
wearing two hats if they're competent, than putting somebody who isn't
competent in power simply because we've run out of warm bodies willing
to do the job.  At one point in time we actually had trouble filling
all the Trustee slots, and several of the past Trustee elections have
been vacant.  I know that in private there have been discussions and
the occasional conscious decision for people in these sorts of roles
to not run for re-election just to try to encourage new blood to stop
up, or to get out of the way of those who would benefit from
experience.  When Council members can't make meetings we try to find
proxies and that is also another avenue to expose people to the role.

Bringing up new leaders is always a challenge because the stuff the
leadership tends to deal with is often qualitatively different from
the stuff ordinary devs do.  You can't just look at the quality of
somebody's commits and decide that they'd make a good member of
Comrel.  Perhaps we need to find more minor roles that devs hold as a
stepping stone, and to also help spread the work.

-- 
Rich