Re: [gentoo-project] [RFC] Triumvirate in Gentoo

[Michał Górny]

On Thu, 2020-06-04 at 09:12 -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 3:15 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:
> > 1. Technical lead -- a person with exceptional technical talents that
> > would build the vision of Gentoo from technical perspective, i.e. make
> > a distribution that people would love using.  Initially, this role could
> > be taken by the QA lead.
> >
> > 2. Social lead -- a person with exceptional social skills that would
> > build the vision of Gentoo from community perspective, i.e. make
> > a distribution that people would love contributing to.  Initially, this
> > role would taken by the ComRel lead.
> >
> > 3. Organization lead -- a person with (exceptional) business skills that
> > would take care of all the financial and organizational aspects of
> > Gentoo, i.e. make a distribution that sustains.  Initially, this role
> > would be taken by the Foundation president.
> >
>
> A few thoughts:
>
> 1.  There may be some legal challenges with the Foundation around
> this, but I don't want to elaborate on this.  Many are obvious.

I don't want to shoot it down entirely because we're bound
to the Foundation that some of the Trustees were promising to disband
for years.  For now, let's assume it doesn't necessarily exist,
and the organization triumvir is the person interacting with Foundation
or any other legal body.


> 3.  Do all decisions require a majority of the 3, or will these
> individuals have their own scope?  Will a new technical GLEP just be
> approved by the "tech lead" or all three?  Could the two non-tech
> leads override the tech lead on a tech decision?  Obviously the goal
> is collaboration but presumably you want this to solve situations
> where collaboration already fails.  I won't go on forever but I could
> see challenges either way.

I dare say that one of them can make decisions if the two other don't
object to them.  So it's mostly a matter of establishing an agreement
between the three whether they want to get involved every time,
or approve deferring specific kind of decisions to one of them.

In either case, I honestly doubt that having to wait for two others to
step in would be worse than the current status quo of waiting up to
a month for Council to meet and decide, possibly reading the proposals
last minute and not even having time to provide feedback without
deferring it further.

> 4.  How does accountability work?  Are we going to get volunteers who
> are going to be competent and accept singular accountability without
> compensation?  We struggle to fill Trustee slots and their
> responsibilities are somewhat nebulous/dilute.  Will somebody
> competent want to be singularly responsible for all fiscal problems
> without compensation?  Don't get me wrong - singular accountability
> works well in practice but usually these roles are well-compensated.
> I could see this being a bigger problem with the org lead role.

I don't think we can know unless we see.  It much depends on what
happens with the Foundation -- it may continue existing with lead org
being responsible for interacting with it, or be replaced by another org
with org lead being responsible for communicating with them.

> 5.  I could see a lot of bleed-over.  If you want to stack the
> leadership with pro/anti-emacs members, why would you limit that to
> only the technical role?  Obviously I'm more concerned with more
> timely issues but we all know of a bunch of hot-button topics where
> top-down control can be used to push an agenda.  So you could end up
> with an org lead who cares little about the financials simply because
> they have the right position on the hot topic of the day.  Today these
> jobs are more delegated so that the elected board can represent the
> community but delegate the actual work to people who are more focused
> on the actual work.  Sure, you could blame the voters for this sort of
> problem, but we already know how people tend to vote so we're not
> entirely blame-free if we set it up this way...
>

I don't really understand why you assume that such a thing would happen.
Did we ever really have someone *that* unprofessional on the Council or
Trustees to push puny personal agenda over the best interest
of the distribution?  I don't see any possible change here.  The same
problem can happen whether we're talking of 1, 3, 7 or 12 people
in charge.  Well, you could even argue that the latter is even more
possible because the responsibility is diluted, while if there's just
one responsible person, then the full blame goes to that person.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny