Re: [gentoo-project] Why should you *not* vote on existing Council members

[Thomas Deutschmann]

Hi,

On 2019-06-14 19:57, Michał Górny wrote:
> Meeting time changes without announcement
> =========================================
> This year we had a pretty unique situation.  Possibly for the first time
> in history of Gentoo, a Council member who couldn't attend the meeting
> requested changing meeting time rather than appointing a proxy.
>
> What I perceive to be a problem is that Council unilaterally changed
> the meeting time without being concerned about other attendees.  They
> not only failed to ask people submitting the items but also failed to
> inform them properly.
>
> The only way to know about the changed time was to notice it
> on the agenda [7].  There wasn't even a single 'please note that
> the meeting will be held 2 hours later than usual'.

As council member who was chairing the meeting in question, this false
accusation makes me angry. Let me add some facts:

- On 2019-04-25, a council member asked other council members to move
upcoming meeting on 12th of may by an hour or two in advance.

- All council member agreed to change time to 21:00 UTC for this meeting.

- Topic in IRC was set accordingly.

- When meeting agenda was published, the changed meeting time was
communicated.

- Yes, I did *not* add a special paragraph like

> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO CHANGED MEETING TIME +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++
> +++ IMPORTANT +++

- In addition, people *required* for meeting according to agenda
received an additional invitation with all details (antarus should be
able to confirm).

So really, saying "meeting time changes without announcement" is wrong,
misleading and discrediting current council. Sure, in retrospective I am
sorry for not adding a special paragraph. But on the other hand: When
you don't read announcement mail in first place, why should you notice
the special paragraph?! You either read mail or you don't...


> Secret meetings, secret decisions
> =================================
> This year's Council has been engaged in accepting secret agenda item
> concerning commit access of a pseudonymous dev, holding secret meetings,
> over it and making secret decisions that were never announced.
> At the same time, they managed to blame Undertakers for not knowing
> about any of that.
>
> To cite a Bugzilla comment on the topic:
>
> | You are aware that we have a special situation here? Most of
> | the inactivity period falls between the acceptance of GLEP 76
> | (in September/October 2018) and the Council sorting out a way for him
> | how to proceed (in April 2019).  [...]  [11]
>
> Are you aware of those April 2019 proceedings?  Because there's no trace
> of any decision in meeting logs.

This is another false accusation.

Like you can read in *public* meeting log, NP-Hardass asked council
member for a private talk:

> 16:01 <+NP-Hardass> Yeah, I'd like to meet privately with the council
>                     after open floor to discuss my commit privileges


Really, aren't council member allowed to talk with others privately?
Like you can see I made it very clear that we will not decide anything:

> 16:02 <@Whissi> Sure we can talk privately but any decision must be public.

And exactly that's what happened: We talked about a *private* topic and
nothing was decided.

So please stop your false accusation, misleading statements and
discrediting current council.


> Abusing Council position to change own team's policy
> ====================================================
> How would you feel about a person that's both in QA and Council using
> his Council position to change a policy that's been proposed with QA
> lead's blessing?
>
> [...]

This is an interesting topic. If I would be part of QA project and I
would be the person you are talking about, I would contradict you
energetically. Because I am not I just want to add the following note to
the remarkable council meeting you quoted:

If you read raw meeting log you could come to the conclusion that you
(mgorny) were threatening ulm or that ulm wasn't at least free anymore
in his decision:

> 21:42:29]<mgorny>    Whissi: are you going to call another vote with 14d,
>                      so i could be angry with ulm for wasting time over
>                      one day?

This isn't just my view, more than 2 other developers shared their
concerns with me after they read posted raw meeting log.

Sure, you were pushing for that change and seeing it already failing two
times can be frustrating if you really believe that this is an important
change which is good for Gentoo (while I still disagree with the motion,
I can understand that this can be a frustrating experience). However you
cannot say that you heard for the first time that people have problems
with the proposed ban period
(https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/ba028e0ca53f6f55cf04f52645b52cee).

Like I acknowledged after meeting, as meeting chair, I did a very poor
job: I wasn't prepared to reprimand dilfridge (because I didn't know
about the rule that only meeting chair should ban) and I did not have
the courage to end this unworthy spectacle.

In reply to Andrew's mail
(https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/d1433dbe7fcbe81305e7b0b0007441ee)
who criticized the decision I just want to add that the decision was
very close and far from unanimous: If either QA member would have
abstained from vote due to possible conflict of interest or didn't
change from NO to ABSTAIN to demonstrate protest, the last motion would
have failed like the others before...


PS: In your mail you wrote later,

> The way I see it, proposals should be discussed on mailing lists,
> and Council approval should be merely a formality based on earlier
> discussion.

I agree with that. Discussion should happen before, council should only
ack/nack. It must be surprising for all Gentoo developer to see a
proposal about 30d and you stop discussing at some point because you
assume everything is said and it will get rejected that way just to
learn later that it passed because motion was changed during meeting and
you hadn't any chance to speak up. I hope nobody is surprised that
everything has at least two views...


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
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