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

[M. J. Everitt]

On 13/11/16 13:59, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 7:52 AM, M. J. Everitt <m.j.everitt@×××.org> wrote:
>> On 13/11/16 12:33, Luca Barbato wrote:
>>> On 13/10/2016 01:30, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
>>>> TL;DR: move comrel, infra, PR to Foundation. Have strict(er)
>>>> application of policies to them in line with their powers.
>>> The foundation was made only to collect and redistribute money. In order
>>> to do that it was made sort of copyright collector as well (but that was
>>> actively blocked by the fact the EU law prevents that).
>>>
>>> In short and sweet summary:
>>>
>>> - The Council was made to be the team leading Gentoo, we have elections
>>> for that reason.
>>> - Recruitment should get new wonderful people as Developers, either by
>>> inviting them or by vetting them.
>>> - Comrel is offloading from the council the management of conflicts
>>> between developers. Incidentally it had to manage also troublemakers,
>>> creeps, and other horrible people that the recruitment process failed to
>>> recognize as such (luckily happened really few times).
>>> - Q/A is offloading from the council the management of day-by-day
>>> technical issues and possibly prevent people not so skilled from destroy
>>> systems.
>>> - Foundation should just care of money on behalf of the council and not
>>> interfere with the community.
>>>
>>> Giving the Foundation more power than act as financial operations is a
>>> quite bad idea to me.
>>>
>> EWW .. forgive my boldness, but that is the Exact Opposite of what needs
>> to happen. What you are, in effect, proposing, is that for all intents
>> and purposes, you can merge the Function of the foundation INTO council.
>> Why keep them separate if the legal body is the Council and it is
>> adequately ratified by its developers, but yet not the general community
>> and membership at large.
> Why would we want people who don't make any significant contributions
> to the organization to be voting on how it ought to operate?
>
> Those who do make significant contributions ought to sign up to be
> developers/staff/whatever (you don't need to write ebuilds to be a
> developer), and then they get to vote for Council.
Yes, but status quo (unless I'm mistaken) is not all contributors (just
ebuild devs??) vote for council, or am I mistaken ... could easily be
mistaken here .. and appropriate stats would have to be found to
demonstrate that non-ebuild devs were still actively being represented
on the council (possibly even my a single defined non-technical
role?).... another bike-shed .. I apologise ...
> Even if we were to put the Foundation on top I don't think that people
> who aren't recognized as developers/staff/whatever (don't want to make
> this about the label) should be voting for the board.
>
> I get that letting everybody on the planet vote for how we do things
> sounds more open, but the reality is that we need to maintain an
> environment where people want to contribute to Gentoo.  If Gentoo
> doesn't work for the people who contribute the most, then there isn't
> going to be much left for the people who just want to use it.
>
>> This only goes to reinforce the status quo that
>> the council is a self-serving self-reinforcing body.... A single-headed
>> monster if you will.
> The council serves the distro, and is elected by the developer
> community.  I don't get how it could possibly be considered
> self-reinforcing.  You could argue that the developer community as a
> whole might be, but they're also the ones doing all the work to make
> things happen (and people doing a lot of work who aren't in the
> developer community should be added as long as they abide by the
> standards).
[snip]
>
> Ultimately I think we need to remember why we're here.
>
> We're not here to run a Foundation.
>
> We're not here to buy and run servers.
>
> We're not even here to run an HR department or be on Council.
>
> We're here to create a Linux distribution.  Ultimately all of these
> things need to serve that larger goal.
^ This .. this cannot be overstated. It seems we frequently lose sight
of this ...
> So, I think in some sense it could make sense to just have one overall
> body that looks after the needs of the distro, which is elected by the
> contributors to the distro, and then everything else falls into
> projects/etc around this.  We have a project for QA, we have a project
> for Infra, and we could have a project for the US Foundation, or a
> project to manage a relationship with an umbrella organization like
> SPI if we don't want the hassle of running a Foundation ourselves
> (which seems to be more of the trend lately, as Debian and Arch now
> use SPI instead of running their own Foundation).  What you call the
> one overall body seems secondary to its purpose of keeping all the
> pieces working together smoothly while being accountable to the
> contributors.
>
Conceivably this would also work .. a 'Finance' project .. a 'Legal'
project.. if that's the way you want to do it, great. But the flow of
accountability should be clear and transparent. And if there should be a
problem with the council, ever, there should be an independent body (a
Trust frequently or other Board of Directors, non-executive, etc) which
can review and rectify any exclusively council issues, upholding the key
aim of creating a Linux Distro.