Re: [gentoo-project] Social Contract clean-up

[Daniel Robbins]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 4:42 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
>
>
> Ultimately I don't think it makes sense to have "user representatives"
> per se because it just leads into moralistic arguments about how one
> person's opinion counts more than an other's because according to
> their job title they officially represent "the users."  I think it
> also implies that everybody else necessarily isn't interested in "the
> users" and has to be reined in.
>

Every participant in council gets a vote. User Representatives get one
vote, and they are in a minority. On pressing issues, I would expect them
to potentially swing some votes, but only if they could get some level of
support from the other Council members.


> Since none of us are paid to be here, I think it is safe to say that
> we're here because we ARE fairly heavy users and thus have an interest
> in a good user experience...
>

Again, this is a moral hazard -- while developers are clearly heavy users
of Gentoo, they do not necessarily represent interests of non-developers.

I would think you would have no issue of having a more formal process of
obtaining user feedback and incorporating it into our development process.

This is also a nice counter-balance for restricting mailing lists that get
overrun with off-topic discussions and thus impact volunteer developer
productivity. It replaces this old, informal and inefficient method with
one that is better integrated into our internal processes.

Best,

Daniel