Re: [gentoo-project] Groups under the Council or Foundation: the structure & processes thereof

[Matthew Thode]

On 10/13/2016 05:16 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 6:30 PM, Robin H. Johnson <robbat2@g.o> wrote:
>> TL;DR: move comrel, infra, PR to Foundation. Have strict(er) application
>> of policies to them in line with their powers.
>>
>
> While in an ideal world I can see the concept, I think this would be a
> serious mistake in practice for a few reasons:
>
> 1.  I don't think we ought to be giving more power to the Foundation
> until the Foundation membership is re-aligned with the distro
> developer membership.  We essentially have two democratic
> organizations with overlapping but different constituencies, and I'm
> not sure Gentoo could survive if they start trying to pull the distro
> in different directions since the community seems like it is barely
> above critical mass as it is.
>
It's not more power if they already have it.  As far as who's a member
of what is concerned I do think that should be discussed before we
decide to go forward with this.

> 2.  The Foundation needs to focus first and foremost on keeping the
> lights on.  Right now there are 10 periodic activities that the
> Foundation needs to perform to be in compliance with the law/etc, and
> according to the public records of the Foundation we're current on 6
> of them.  Not all are equally important, and maybe we're just bad at
> recordkeeping, but it isn't a great sign.  (
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Activity_Tracker )
>
Some of them are in progress and I've updated the one I know about for
sure (fairly sure the presidents report has been done as well).  So the
only outstanding things are cleaning up our financials, which is in
progress.

> 3.  I've yet to see any evidence that Comrel has actually done
> anything wrong.  In recent days I've seen one appeal, in which there
> was seen some need to improve things, but the conclusion was that they
> basically came to the right decision.  If developers don't trust the
> judgement of the Council on this they can always vote in a new
> Council, but unless they elect people who are out to get rid of comrel
> for the sake of doing so I am skeptical that they would come to a
> different conclusion.  Unfortunately I can't talk about all the
> allegations for those involved.  We also have an active thread where
> somebody is complaining about Comrel but refuses to actually appeal,
> and has commented in the thread that he thinks it is unlikely that his
> appeal would be successful.
>
> I think there is room for improvement here, but I think it would be a
> mistake to do something drastic.

I'm not sure it's drastic to change our metastructure this way as much
as people seem to think.  It would be bringing it in line with the real
world, as mentioned elsewhere, the two headed beast that we are works
only if the two heads are very friendly.

>
> --
> Rich
>


-- 
-- Matthew Thode (prometheanfire)