[gentoo-project] [RFC] Triumvirate in Gentoo

[Michał Górny]

Hello, everyone.

This is something I wanted to discuss back in April but due to the peak
of covid pandemic I've delayed it.  Today things seem to be improving
a bit, at least in Europe, so I'd like to bring it up now, especially
with the elections coming soon.


Gentoo is technically led by two bodies -- the Council and the Trustees.
While this somewhat works for many years, people have repeatedly pointed
out that it's far from perfect and that it is preventing Gentoo from
gaining more popularity.  Some of them are looking into the times of
BDFL with longing, others are considering it the worst thing ever. 
Nevertheless, there are problems with the current state of things.

Firstly, we have two leading bodies and still no clear distinction
between their roles.  Some developers agree on split being here, some
developers put it elsewhere but in the end, nothing has been really
decided.  From time to time one of the bodies tries to push their border
forward, then backs down and we're back where we started.

Secondly, for historical reasons the both bodies are elected by two
electorates that only partially overlap.  Surely, today the overlap is
reasonable but is there any real reason for different people to elect
both bodies?  In the end, it is entirely possible for one body to
arbitrarily change their electorate and made it completely disjoint.

Thirdly, large governing bodies don't really work.  Instead of having
one consistent vision of Gentoo, we have 12.  What we get is a semi-
random combination of parts of their visions that just happened to hit
majority in their votes.  It gets absurd to the point that a body can
make half-way decisions just because first half passed vote
and the second didn't (remember closing -dev but leaving -project
open?).

Compromises are sometimes good and sometimes horrible.  If one dev wants
to paint the bikeshed red and another one blue, mixings the two colors
doesn't really get either what he wants.  You just get a third color
that nobody is happy with, and in the best case you could say that
neither of them got what he wanted.


BDFL is not a perfect solution either.  While having one has the obvious
advantage of having a single consistent vision for the distribution,
giving absolute power to a single person creates a fair risk of abuse. 
This is not something most of Gentoo devs would agree to.


All that said, I'd propose to meet in the middle -- following
the ancient tradition, establish a triumvirate in Gentoo.  It would be:

1. Technical lead -- a person with exceptional technical talents that
would build the vision of Gentoo from technical perspective, i.e. make
a distribution that people would love using.  Initially, this role could
be taken by the QA lead.

2. Social lead -- a person with exceptional social skills that would
build the vision of Gentoo from community perspective, i.e. make
a distribution that people would love contributing to.  Initially, this
role would taken by the ComRel lead.

3. Organization lead -- a person with (exceptional) business skills that
would take care of all the financial and organizational aspects of
Gentoo, i.e. make a distribution that sustains.  Initially, this role
would be taken by the Foundation president.

Three seems to be a very good number -- on one hand, it's more than one,
so the others can stop any single one from getting absolute power.
On the other, it's small enough for them to be able to actively work
together and directly establish a common set of goals (i.e. via
an agreement rather than a majority vote).


WDYT?

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny