[gentoo-council] RE: [gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-dev] Special meeting [WAS: Council meeting summary for 8 May 2008]

["Chrissy Fullam" <musikc@gentoo.org>]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> 
> On 16:33 Thu 08 May     , Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > Enforced retirement: After 2.5 hours on the previous topics, people had
> > to go to sleep and jokey's computer broke. Instead of waiting till the
> > next regular meeting, because of its urgency, we scheduled a special
> > session next week at the same time. The appeals will *not* be decided
> > then -- it's about figuring out the validity and the process.
> 
> 2 of us have shown up -- amne and me. That's really pathetic, guys. What
> happened? Did the rest of you miss the announcement in the summary? 
> 
> tove brought up an interesting point from GLEP 39:
> 
>     If any meeting has less than 50% attendance by council members, a
>     new election for all places must be held within a month. The 'one
>     year' is then reset from that point.
> 
> musikc questioned whether that was only intended for the regular
> meetings or also irregular ones like this.

I've decided to just respond to the original post, however my comments will
include responses to a variety of posts I've read. As a result, this is
somewhat long so I apologize in advance for the lengthy read.

GLEP changes do not have to be voted by the entire developer community, so
if you wish to entertain this line of discussion please help me understand
what policy you base it off of. 

Council votes on GLEP's. Council, in my opinion, is quite capable of editing
a GLEP if something is deemed unclear or would benefit from more exact
wording, we did after all vote for them to make decisions - not to ask our
approval on every decision they wish to make.
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0001.html. I reference that link for
this section: "GLEPs are reviewed by the appropriate Gentoo Manager [8], who
may approve or reject a GLEP outright, or send it back to the author(s) for
revision." I see Council as our appropriate Gentoo Managers. Perhaps this
should be better spelled out?

I don't see the relevance in hearing from the authors of this GLEP on how a
section was intended post-creation. 
I see nothing wrong with acknowledging a policy, or in this case a GLEP,
needs to be revised, revising it, and immediately following it. Perhaps this
is why our policies are digital and not carved into stone tablets? We are a
fluid distro, subject to make changes as new needs or awareness arises. We
are not a legal or official government body, so I have no interest in people
trying to complicate this more than necessary. Please note I see nothing
wrong with sanely and civilly stating your opinion, not to be confused with
arguing because others do not share your opinion.

I am frustrated that more Council members did not show up, however I have no
interest in voting for another Council at this time. Personally, I would
vote for the exact same Council members. They made a mistake and several
have explained how it happened. For me to want to remove someone for a
single mistake, it would have to be such a catastrophic error, which I do
not feel this is. 

I think any Council meeting in the future should be publicized better than
this one was. That is where we can learn from our mistakes. Perhaps more
Council members would have shown up if they received the standard email
reminders that we currently enjoy for our scheduled monthly meetings.
Perhaps this reminder would have reminded those who were unlikely to show up
to assign a proxy. There are several perhaps here, but again they all center
around hindsight being 20/20 and us learning and moving forward in a
positive direction.

Council,
You fill a necessary role that many of us would not want to do ourselves, it
is indeed quite challenging to make a decision that you believe in and
balance that with what you think may best represent the wishes of the
developers, so I thank you for the hard work and the good job that you have
done thus far.


Kind regards,
Christina Fullam
Gentoo Developer Relations Lead | Gentoo Public Relations 




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