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

[Michał Górny]

Hello,

TL;DR: I am suggesting that we should vote out existing Council members,
and give new people a chance to make a better Council.


Back in April I have voiced concerns about 'low Coucil member
involvement outside [Council] meetings' [1].  The Council members did
not really reply to that thread.  However, blueness has made
an interesting point:

| I was on the Council for several years in a row.  When I first got
| on,  I was super enthusiastic and always came prepared.  However,
| after a few years, I burned out.  I noticed the same in other council
| members that slowly petered away during the year.  Since at any given
| time there are only a few enthusiastic gentoo devs who would step up
| to do council work, and that incumbents tend to be re-elected, I'm
| not surprised that this is a chronic problem.  [2]

Given that half of the existing Council members have already accepted
their nominations, including three that were in the Council for at least
4 years in a row (see [3] for nominees, [4] for past terms), I'm
starting to feel like the next term is not going to be different.

Last year, I've attempted to improve things by organizing a pre-election 
Q&A session [5].  I think it was a partial success.  The interest in it
exceeded my expectations, and as a result the work involved in it
exceeded my preparations ;-).  Sadly, as it happens in politics, not all
Council members followed their early ideas.

This year I don't really have time nor motivation to do such a thing. 
Instead, I would like to focus on summarizing the problems I've noticed during the existing Council term (where I happened to be one of top agenda posters), and attempting to encourage you to vote on getting new people into the Council over the dinosaurs.

In this post, I will try to focus on general problems and not specific
people.  All nicknames will be replaced with 'xxx' (and 'yyy'...
as necessary).  Please note that 'xxx' will not mean the same person
in different citations.  However, at the same time I wish to support my
claims with evidence in the form of meeting logs.  I have to warn that
if you don't wish to learn who the member in question was, please do not
follow the evidence links.


Lack of time
============
I understand that we all have a lot of work, and we can't be expected to
spend all our free time on Gentoo.  However, at the same time I believe
that if you choose to accept Council nomination, you should be able to
find time to do the necessary work.  This involves not only spending ~2
hours around monthly meetings but also the time needed to prepare
and discuss agenda items *before* the meetings.

An example that got me quite mad was when a Council member started
quickly listing problems with a GLEP during the meeting because he
didn't find time to review it in the previous month:

<xxx> yyy: last month I've been out of country 3-4 days of the week, I
haven't really read it before now  [6]

Good news is, the member in question finally managed to review it three
weeks later.  Does he expect to have more time this year?


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'.


Council members avoiding public discussion
==========================================
Having agenda items discussed properly before the meeting is important. 
However, we still tend to have Council members who prefer to save their
arguments for the meeting, and make decisions based on their private
opinion without consulting it with the wider community.

So back when GLEP 63 updates were proposed, two of the devs decided not
to provide their feedback before the meeting:

<xxx> I am sorry for not providing my feedback yet... but I have
negative feedback
<yyy> i'd like to see explicit approval from security@  [8]

Again, this is three weeks after the GLEP was sent for review.  It is
really frustrating when people choose not to take part in normal
discussion but instead prolong the meeting bringing the points
and demanding immediate explanation during the meeting.

In the end, I am put in a rough spot.  I have to either choose to follow
my ideals and defer the GLEP to another month on the mailing list, just
to possible have it deferred again on the next meeting when Council
members come again unprepared, or I have to convince people to accept it
on the spot.

And it's not the first time we end up making last minute changes to
GLEPs that are never publicly discussed properly.


The usual deal with summaries
=============================
This is so common that I'm only going to dedicated a single paragraph
on it.  Council members are chronically failing to publish meeting
summaries on time.  At this very moment, the summary for Dec 2018
meeting is still missing [9].  git log for the repo pretty much
summarizes it all [10].


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.


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?

<xxx> I'd be fine with 14 days at most
...
* xxx no (I said before I would be o.k. with 14 days at most)  [12]

And so the Council has voted 3 times: first for 30 days (rejected with
3/3 y/n votes), then for 15 days (rejected with 2/3 y/n), then finally
passed with 14 days (3/2 y/n).

Besides the dev in question being clearly in conflict of interest, he
also managed to childishly fight over one day.

To quote another Council member during the same meeting:

<yyy> This is exactly why I proposed banning qa and comrel members from
council


Summary
=======
It is my vision for the Council to represent community, and work with
community to make a better Gentoo.  However, I feel like the current
Council is more focused on treasuring their own superiority and power.

To reiterate two of my major points:

1. Council members don't really have time to be on the Council, yet they
continue running for the next term.

2. Council members like to make important decisions within one or two
hours of Council meeting privately, and frequently don't value wider
feedback beforehand.

The way I see it, proposals should be discussed on mailing lists,
and Council approval should be merely a formality based on earlier
discussion.  However, with the current Council you are required to
attend meetings and personally convince Council members to whatever
seemed like wholly agreed thing beforehand, or promptly answer feedback
that should have been made to the mailing lists beforehand.

I have raised this problem earlier, and Council members did not consider
answering.  Now they expect that they will become elected again, just
because they were elected last time and the time before that.  I think
it's really time to make a change, and show that Council elections are
not a popularity contest.


[1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/30927021be7c8425f43b95f7364111fb
[2] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/a4cb19a3c922b78d0fa9f365d06306cb
[3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Elections/Council/201906
[4] https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/gentoo-management.html
[5] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/6be23c1cbffb7e27cd161a3b51312a8c
[6] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190414.txt
[7] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/f13a423c093fef063d3d738154faa99c
[8] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20180729.txt
[9] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/Meeting_logs
[10] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/sites/projects/council.git/log/
[11] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=np-hardass#c33
[12] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190512.txt

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny