[gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Ned Ludd]

The dev population is quite a strange beast. I never expected to win. 
Why would you vote for somebody who did not even publish a manifesto?
I don't know but I love you for it. My only intention was to help offset
dev-zero being able force the will of outside forces upon us. 
Well that has been accomplished for now (w00t). But I
never ever expected to be ranked so high. "/me blushes" So that means you
guys/gals expect stuff from me. Well as I never wrote a manifesto but
you still voted for me, I guess I should share some of my ideas on what
I'd like to see happen over the following year.

The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote.
But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you
voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be
really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to
change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a
year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round
on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have
a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive
conversations without being labeled troll.

Another one of the things I'd like to see and help reform with the
council. First off it spends way too much time on EAPI/PMS. There is no
reason to make the council an extension of the portage team. Portage is
still the official package manager of Gentoo. Granted it's good to 
accommodate others to an extent and I've always kept an open mind on other tools.
Alternatives are good as there is always the right tool for the task at hand. But
the council really should not be getting involved most of the time unless there 
is a conflict which can't be worked out among the masses and those trying to get
portage to adopt new features. If the dev body wants it otherwise then
I'd like to turn my vote over to you the devs. Each and every time the
council wants/has to vote on an EAPI/PMS feature then I'll happily put my
vote in your hands. You fire up that old votify system and use my vote
as yours. Note however that zmedico is not in favor of his time being
wasted on deciding what PMS/EAPI features are good. He simply likes bugs
and solving those. He likes giving us new features and tends to be more in
favor of the devs and community figuring out what is best for us. 
An EAPI review committee could work well also. As long as we could get 
non bias people in there.

The council should be more about community vs technical issues only.
We have lots of top level projects within Gentoo which have simply given
up on the council as being an outlet to accomplish anything useful.
It should be our job to look at the projects in Gentoo. Look at the ones
that have a healthy community and encourage and promote them in ways.

For example prefix comes to mind. It was a project I did not like at
first. I'm not even a user. And there are things I surely don't like
about it as is. But there is community support and it's the icing on the
cake for some. So I'll back the fsck up and give credit where it's due.
This is a perfectly good example of a project/fork that needs to come
back home. Perhaps it's time to cherry pick some more stuff/people out 
of Sunrise?

desultory points out any two council members can decide to approve anything, 
and that decision is considered to be equivalent to a full council vote
until the next meeting. I vaguely recall that rule. I'm not sure about you, 
but I think that is a little to much power to put in the hands of a few.
Any dev mind if we dump that power?

Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be
handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings.  The reason for
this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless
discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit,
technical and social.

The reason the meetings should go back to monthly is to allow those who
are council members in Gentoo to accomplish things other than the
council only. We all have personal lives and we all have our respective
roles we play outside of the council. Another note on meetings. The time 
they are held currently don't fit well with my work schedule.

I'm not subscribed directly to the gentoo-dev mailing list anymore
outside of post-only. And I don't plan to re-subscribe. I do browse 
the archives regularly however. If there is some topic that should 
be brought to my attention please point it out to me directly on irc 
or CC: me.

Thank you all and I will try not to let you down. Unless you were one of
the ones who wanted to me lose. Then sorry, but I'm going to have fun
disappointing you, by doing what is best for Gentoo.

If you have any ideas on how you think the council should function or 
reform itself. Please start a new thread or email those who think will 
listen to those ideas. I'm open for some real change as long as it's 
for the the positive.

So lets have some damn fun again !@#$ 
Thanks.

Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Doug Goldstein]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 9:33 PM, Ned Ludd<solar@gentoo.org> wrote:
> The dev population is quite a strange beast. I never expected to win.
> Why would you vote for somebody who did not even publish a manifesto?
> I don't know but I love you for it. My only intention was to help offset
> dev-zero being able force the will of outside forces upon us.
> Well that has been accomplished for now (w00t). But I
> never ever expected to be ranked so high. "/me blushes" So that means you
> guys/gals expect stuff from me. Well as I never wrote a manifesto but
> you still voted for me, I guess I should share some of my ideas on what
> I'd like to see happen over the following year.
>
> The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote.
> But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you
> voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be
> really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to
> change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a
> year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round
> on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have
> a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive
> conversations without being labeled troll.
>
> Another one of the things I'd like to see and help reform with the
> council. First off it spends way too much time on EAPI/PMS. There is no
> reason to make the council an extension of the portage team. Portage is
> still the official package manager of Gentoo. Granted it's good to
> accommodate others to an extent and I've always kept an open mind on other tools.
> Alternatives are good as there is always the right tool for the task at hand. But
> the council really should not be getting involved most of the time unless there
> is a conflict which can't be worked out among the masses and those trying to get
> portage to adopt new features. If the dev body wants it otherwise then
> I'd like to turn my vote over to you the devs. Each and every time the
> council wants/has to vote on an EAPI/PMS feature then I'll happily put my
> vote in your hands. You fire up that old votify system and use my vote
> as yours. Note however that zmedico is not in favor of his time being
> wasted on deciding what PMS/EAPI features are good. He simply likes bugs
> and solving those. He likes giving us new features and tends to be more in
> favor of the devs and community figuring out what is best for us.
> An EAPI review committee could work well also. As long as we could get
> non bias people in there.

Thank you. This was one thing I had said time and time again over the
past year. I long ago advocated for the EAPI/PMS crap to be sorted out
by the right people and the council was there to work out any
technical issues. We got the pms ML created and before I officially
joined the council while I was still proxying for Diego, we did handle
one such instance where the PMS people and zmedico had a disagreement.
All of a sudden the next round of EAPI/PMS debates became the complete
mess they are today. Thank you for having the energy to clean this up
again because I know I don't.

>
> The council should be more about community vs technical issues only.
> We have lots of top level projects within Gentoo which have simply given
> up on the council as being an outlet to accomplish anything useful.
> It should be our job to look at the projects in Gentoo. Look at the ones
> that have a healthy community and encourage and promote them in ways.

Bingo. That's exactly the point of the council.

>
> For example prefix comes to mind. It was a project I did not like at
> first. I'm not even a user. And there are things I surely don't like
> about it as is. But there is community support and it's the icing on the
> cake for some. So I'll back the fsck up and give credit where it's due.
> This is a perfectly good example of a project/fork that needs to come
> back home. Perhaps it's time to cherry pick some more stuff/people out
> of Sunrise?
>
> desultory points out any two council members can decide to approve anything,
> and that decision is considered to be equivalent to a full council vote
> until the next meeting. I vaguely recall that rule. I'm not sure about you,
> but I think that is a little to much power to put in the hands of a few.
> Any dev mind if we dump that power?

This should have been dumped a while ago. I believe Halcy0n and I had
issue with it and got a vote to dump it a while back.

>
> Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be
> handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings.  The reason for
> this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless
> discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit,
> technical and social.

Thank you again. I tried the +m/+v thing a year ago and received a few
pieces of hate e-mail from mostly non-developer people. I'll let them
read this on the -dev ML and again let them remind themselves of the
fools they make of themselves on the ML. Recently I tried to introduce
this again but it quickly drained my energy when dealing with council
members in fighting over little rules and tweaks here and there which
then resulted in people saying they weren't for it anymore and it
never happened for the last 2 meetings. I just didn't have the energy
to deal with the bickering between council members over it. I applaud
you for having it.

>
> The reason the meetings should go back to monthly is to allow those who
> are council members in Gentoo to accomplish things other than the
> council only. We all have personal lives and we all have our respective
> roles we play outside of the council. Another note on meetings. The time
> they are held currently don't fit well with my work schedule.

Another HUGE reason why I didn't run again for the council. It simply
took up too much time and took away too much from development. As
everyone noticed for 2009, the meeting times worked horrible for my
work schedule. They in fact worked really bad for most US Gentoo
developer's work schedules and was a huge contributing factor to some
of our better council members resigning. Good luck trying to get the
meetings to be changed. Last time we discussed it, 3 council members
said the meeting times didn't work for them and the other 4 said it
was the only time good for them and it just resulted in a back and
forth.

>
> I'm not subscribed directly to the gentoo-dev mailing list anymore
> outside of post-only. And I don't plan to re-subscribe. I do browse
> the archives regularly however. If there is some topic that should
> be brought to my attention please point it out to me directly on irc
> or CC: me.
>
> Thank you all and I will try not to let you down. Unless you were one of
> the ones who wanted to me lose. Then sorry, but I'm going to have fun
> disappointing you, by doing what is best for Gentoo.
>
> If you have any ideas on how you think the council should function or
> reform itself. Please start a new thread or email those who think will
> listen to those ideas. I'm open for some real change as long as it's
> for the the positive.

Oh how we could talk for hours.... assuming you've got the energy were
mine was burnt out on all the pointless in fighting.

>
> So lets have some damn fun again !@#$
> Thanks.

This is why you got my vote... cause I knew while you and I haven't
gotten along in the past. You feel the same way about Gentoo as I do.

-- 
Doug Goldstein

Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Ferris McCormick]

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There's a lot of good stuff to think about here.  For what it's worth,
some initial comments.

On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 19:33 -0700, Ned Ludd wrote:
> The dev population is quite a strange beast. I never expected to win. 
> Why would you vote for somebody who did not even publish a manifesto?
> I don't know but I love you for it. My only intention was to help offset
> dev-zero being able force the will of outside forces upon us. 
> Well that has been accomplished for now (w00t). But I
> never ever expected to be ranked so high. "/me blushes" So that means you
> guys/gals expect stuff from me. Well as I never wrote a manifesto but
> you still voted for me, I guess I should share some of my ideas on what
> I'd like to see happen over the following year.
> 
> The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote.
> But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you
> voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be
> really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to
> change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a
> year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round
> on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have
> a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive
> conversations without being labeled troll.
> 

We could provide for a recall vote, but I don't like that idea.
Discussion in channel is ideal if there is some way/someone to help keep
it civil enough to be useful.

> Another one of the things I'd like to see and help reform with the
> council. First off it spends way too much time on EAPI/PMS. There is no
> reason to make the council an extension of the portage team. Portage is
> still the official package manager of Gentoo. Granted it's good to 
> accommodate others to an extent and I've always kept an open mind on other tools.
> Alternatives are good as there is always the right tool for the task at hand. But
> the council really should not be getting involved most of the time unless there 
> is a conflict which can't be worked out among the masses and those trying to get
> portage to adopt new features. If the dev body wants it otherwise then
> I'd like to turn my vote over to you the devs. Each and every time the
> council wants/has to vote on an EAPI/PMS feature then I'll happily put my
> vote in your hands. You fire up that old votify system and use my vote
> as yours.

Not a bad idea if votify is agile enough.

> Note however that zmedico is not in favor of his time being
> wasted on deciding what PMS/EAPI features are good. He simply likes bugs
> and solving those. He likes giving us new features and tends to be more in
> favor of the devs and community figuring out what is best for us. 
> An EAPI review committee could work well also. As long as we could get 
> non bias people in there.
> 
EAPI review committee --- please do.  I agree that council meetings are
not the place to do detail EAPI work.

> The council should be more about community vs technical issues only.
> We have lots of top level projects within Gentoo which have simply given
> up on the council as being an outlet to accomplish anything useful.
> It should be our job to look at the projects in Gentoo. Look at the ones
> that have a healthy community and encourage and promote them in ways.
> 
Agreed.

> For example prefix comes to mind. It was a project I did not like at
> first. I'm not even a user. And there are things I surely don't like
> about it as is. But there is community support and it's the icing on the
> cake for some. So I'll back the fsck up and give credit where it's due.
> This is a perfectly good example of a project/fork that needs to come
> back home. Perhaps it's time to cherry pick some more stuff/people out 
> of Sunrise?
> 
> desultory points out any two council members can decide to approve anything, 
> and that decision is considered to be equivalent to a full council vote
> until the next meeting. I vaguely recall that rule. I'm not sure about you, 
> but I think that is a little to much power to put in the hands of a few.
> Any dev mind if we dump that power?
> 
Dump it.

> Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be
> handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings.  The reason for
> this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless
> discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit,
> technical and social.
> 
Probably a good idea.  I don't much care for biweekly free-for-alls
either.

> The reason the meetings should go back to monthly is to allow those who
> are council members in Gentoo to accomplish things other than the
> council only. We all have personal lives and we all have our respective
> roles we play outside of the council. Another note on meetings. The time 
> they are held currently don't fit well with my work schedule.
> 
> I'm not subscribed directly to the gentoo-dev mailing list anymore
> outside of post-only. And I don't plan to re-subscribe. I do browse 
> the archives regularly however. If there is some topic that should 
> be brought to my attention please point it out to me directly on irc 
> or CC: me.
> 
> Thank you all and I will try not to let you down. Unless you were one of
> the ones who wanted to me lose. Then sorry, but I'm going to have fun
> disappointing you, by doing what is best for Gentoo.
> 
> If you have any ideas on how you think the council should function or 
> reform itself. Please start a new thread or email those who think will 
> listen to those ideas. I'm open for some real change as long as it's 
> for the the positive.
> 
Thank you.

> So lets have some damn fun again !@#$ 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
Regards,
Ferris
-- 
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Sparc, Userrel, Trustees)

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Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Ned Ludd wrote:
> The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote.
> But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you
> voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be
> really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to
> change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a
> year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round
> on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have
> a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive
> conversations without being labeled troll.

I'm not sure about that, but we can easily give it a try.

What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to
modify or change parts of glep 39. As it's the council's constitution
somehow, we have two options from my pov (besides that a former council
did decide the council itself can change it's rules):
- a large majority (at least 5 out of 7) of council members needs to ack
the change
- changes to glep 39 require a vote with all developers participating
and a large majority (2/3 or 3/4) needs to ack the suggested change

Also I'd like to require commit messages to gleps (and especially glep
39) being useful and denote based on which decision by whom that change
got made. For example the following commit message I'd consider quite
useless (at least two or three years ago):

"Add the one person one vote clause to GLEP 39 as agreed." [1]

Who did agree? Where is that noted down? ... and so on.

> An EAPI review committee could work well also. As long as we could get 
> non bias people in there.

I was thinking about that for quite some time and as long as we get some
non-biased people in there we should try that as well.

> The council should be more about community vs technical issues only.
> We have lots of top level projects within Gentoo which have simply given
> up on the council as being an outlet to accomplish anything useful.
> It should be our job to look at the projects in Gentoo. Look at the ones
> that have a healthy community and encourage and promote them in ways.

ack

> For example prefix comes to mind. It was a project I did not like at
> first. I'm not even a user. And there are things I surely don't like
> about it as is. But there is community support and it's the icing on the
> cake for some. So I'll back the fsck up and give credit where it's due.
> This is a perfectly good example of a project/fork that needs to come
> back home. Perhaps it's time to cherry pick some more stuff/people out 
> of Sunrise?

prefix is a really good example, yeah. Nearly noone knows it, but it's
really cool to have for example a virtualized windows machine running on
a linux host. The windows box then runs prefix in interix. Not that it's
really useful at all (hey, it's slow as hell) - but it's very
interesting that such things are possible and it's definitively an
eyecatcher on expos. prefix is one of Gentoo's most underrated projects.

As for Sunrise I do think that's what we already do - but: getting users
more actively involved in Sunrise makes them happy, plus it's easier for
us to recruit new developers. Therefore: push Sunrise! I very much
disliked how the Sunrise project has been started some years ago, but in
the end we do need to integrate it a tad better to make it even more
useful for both users and developers.

> desultory points out any two council members can decide to approve anything, 
> and that decision is considered to be equivalent to a full council vote
> until the next meeting. I vaguely recall that rule. I'm not sure about you, 
> but I think that is a little to much power to put in the hands of a few.
> Any dev mind if we dump that power?

It's quite much power in quite a few hands, but in the end that's some
kind of "last resort rule". All council members should be smart enough
(and i do consider all of us being smart enough) to know when that "last
resort" becomes active. Therefore I think it doesn't hurt to have such a
rule in place. 

> Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be
> handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings.  The reason for
> this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless
> discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit,
> technical and social.
> 
> The reason the meetings should go back to monthly is to allow those who
> are council members in Gentoo to accomplish things other than the
> council only. We all have personal lives and we all have our respective
> roles we play outside of the council. Another note on meetings. The time 
> they are held currently don't fit well with my work schedule.

I'm all for going back to monthly meetings and make them a tad more
organized. As I summarized in the last few minutes of our last council
meeting - we do have rules in place to keep our meetings organized, we
just need to follow them. 

As for meeting times we can (that was mentioned somewhere?) move to 21
or 22 utc - if we're going to monthly meetings and restrict meetings to
say 60 or 90 minutes. If we have an agenda sent out a week ago everyone
should be able to be well prepared for the meeting so a restriction on
length of meetings wouldn't hurt.

If council@g.o is updated we can quickly vote on meeting times.

> Thank you all and I will try not to let you down. Unless you were one of
> the ones who wanted to me lose. Then sorry, but I'm going to have fun
> disappointing you, by doing what is best for Gentoo.

And that's basically our job: taking care of Gentoo.

> So lets have some damn fun again !@#$ 

yay!

- Tobias


[1]
http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/glep/glep-0039.txt?r1=1.1&r2=1.2

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Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Alec Warner]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Tobias Scherbaum<dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Ned Ludd wrote:
>> The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote.
>> But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you
>> voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be
>> really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to
>> change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a
>> year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round
>> on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have
>> a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive
>> conversations without being labeled troll.
>
> I'm not sure about that, but we can easily give it a try.
>
> What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to
> modify or change parts of glep 39. As it's the council's constitution
> somehow, we have two options from my pov (besides that a former council
> did decide the council itself can change it's rules):
> - a large majority (at least 5 out of 7) of council members needs to ack
> the change
> - changes to glep 39 require a vote with all developers participating
> and a large majority (2/3 or 3/4) needs to ack the suggested change

Just FYI, Gentoo is lucky if 1/2 of the devs vote; so I assume here
you mean large majority of the people who actually voted.

>
> Also I'd like to require commit messages to gleps (and especially glep
> 39) being useful and denote based on which decision by whom that change
> got made. For example the following commit message I'd consider quite
> useless (at least two or three years ago):
>
> "Add the one person one vote clause to GLEP 39 as agreed." [1]
>
> Who did agree? Where is that noted down? ... and so on.
>
>> An EAPI review committee could work well also. As long as we could get
>> non bias people in there.
>
> I was thinking about that for quite some time and as long as we get some
> non-biased people in there we should try that as well.
>
>> The council should be more about community vs technical issues only.
>> We have lots of top level projects within Gentoo which have simply given
>> up on the council as being an outlet to accomplish anything useful.
>> It should be our job to look at the projects in Gentoo. Look at the ones
>> that have a healthy community and encourage and promote them in ways.
>
> ack
>
>> For example prefix comes to mind. It was a project I did not like at
>> first. I'm not even a user. And there are things I surely don't like
>> about it as is. But there is community support and it's the icing on the
>> cake for some. So I'll back the fsck up and give credit where it's due.
>> This is a perfectly good example of a project/fork that needs to come
>> back home. Perhaps it's time to cherry pick some more stuff/people out
>> of Sunrise?
>
> prefix is a really good example, yeah. Nearly noone knows it, but it's
> really cool to have for example a virtualized windows machine running on
> a linux host. The windows box then runs prefix in interix. Not that it's
> really useful at all (hey, it's slow as hell) - but it's very
> interesting that such things are possible and it's definitively an
> eyecatcher on expos. prefix is one of Gentoo's most underrated projects.
>
> As for Sunrise I do think that's what we already do - but: getting users
> more actively involved in Sunrise makes them happy, plus it's easier for
> us to recruit new developers. Therefore: push Sunrise! I very much
> disliked how the Sunrise project has been started some years ago, but in
> the end we do need to integrate it a tad better to make it even more
> useful for both users and developers.
>
>> desultory points out any two council members can decide to approve anything,
>> and that decision is considered to be equivalent to a full council vote
>> until the next meeting. I vaguely recall that rule. I'm not sure about you,
>> but I think that is a little to much power to put in the hands of a few.
>> Any dev mind if we dump that power?
>
> It's quite much power in quite a few hands, but in the end that's some
> kind of "last resort rule". All council members should be smart enough
> (and i do consider all of us being smart enough) to know when that "last
> resort" becomes active. Therefore I think it doesn't hurt to have such a
> rule in place.
>
>> Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be
>> handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings.  The reason for
>> this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless
>> discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit,
>> technical and social.
>>
>> The reason the meetings should go back to monthly is to allow those who
>> are council members in Gentoo to accomplish things other than the
>> council only. We all have personal lives and we all have our respective
>> roles we play outside of the council. Another note on meetings. The time
>> they are held currently don't fit well with my work schedule.
>
> I'm all for going back to monthly meetings and make them a tad more
> organized. As I summarized in the last few minutes of our last council
> meeting - we do have rules in place to keep our meetings organized, we
> just need to follow them.
>
> As for meeting times we can (that was mentioned somewhere?) move to 21
> or 22 utc - if we're going to monthly meetings and restrict meetings to
> say 60 or 90 minutes. If we have an agenda sent out a week ago everyone
> should be able to be well prepared for the meeting so a restriction on
> length of meetings wouldn't hurt.
>
> If council@g.o is updated we can quickly vote on meeting times.
>
>> Thank you all and I will try not to let you down. Unless you were one of
>> the ones who wanted to me lose. Then sorry, but I'm going to have fun
>> disappointing you, by doing what is best for Gentoo.
>
> And that's basically our job: taking care of Gentoo.
>
>> So lets have some damn fun again !@#$
>
> yay!
>
> - Tobias
>
>
> [1]
> http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/glep/glep-0039.txt?r1=1.1&r2=1.2
>

Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Alec Warner wrote:
> > What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to
> > modify or change parts of glep 39. As it's the council's constitution
> > somehow, we have two options from my pov (besides that a former council
> > did decide the council itself can change it's rules):
> > - a large majority (at least 5 out of 7) of council members needs to ack
> > the change
> > - changes to glep 39 require a vote with all developers participating
> > and a large majority (2/3 or 3/4) needs to ack the suggested change
> 
> Just FYI, Gentoo is lucky if 1/2 of the devs vote; so I assume here
> you mean large majority of the people who actually voted.

Uhrm, yeah ... of course.

- Tobias

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Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Thursday 02 July 2009 10:54:05 Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> Ned Ludd wrote:
> > The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote.
> > But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you
> > voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be
> > really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to
> > change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a
> > year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round
> > on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have
> > a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive
> > conversations without being labeled troll.
>
> I'm not sure about that, but we can easily give it a try.
>
> What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to
> modify or change parts of glep 39.

we already have a formal method:
 - change is proposed ahead of time like any other business for council to 
review (which means the community sees it)
 - council votes and assuming it passed
 - the dev/council lists are notified of changes (see previous summaries for 
example)
 - if there is still no problems, then the project page/GLEP is amended 
officially

if the dev community has a problem, then it should have come up like any other 
issue along the way.  if the only way to resolve the greater dev concerns is 
with a vote, then that is how it goes.  needing a full community vote all the 
time is a huge time waste for absolutely no gain.
-mike

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Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Denis Dupeyron]

I'll have things to say about this but I'm still in the woods with
dialup until monday. So either I can get close to a fatter pipe later
today or tomorrow, or I'll do it on monday night from home.

Denis.

Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto]

Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> Alec Warner wrote:
>>> What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to
>>> modify or change parts of glep 39. As it's the council's constitution
>>> somehow, we have two options from my pov (besides that a former council
>>> did decide the council itself can change it's rules):
>>> - a large majority (at least 5 out of 7) of council members needs to ack
>>> the change
>>> - changes to glep 39 require a vote with all developers participating
>>> and a large majority (2/3 or 3/4) needs to ack the suggested change
>> Just FYI, Gentoo is lucky if 1/2 of the devs vote; so I assume here
>> you mean large majority of the people who actually voted.
> 
> Uhrm, yeah ... of course.

I have a few ideas about this that I'll have to put in writing and share
later, but let me start by proposing that for such a change we require
the support of at least 2/3 of the devs that vote *and* a minimum of 1/3
of all devs.
By requiring the support of at least 1/3 of all devs, we can ensure that
it won't be possible to have extreme events as getting a policy change
approved by > 90% of the voting devs which happen to represent < 10% of
all devs. OTOH, requiring 2/3 of the voting devs might prove to be to
hard in an election with a high turnout - afaicr we didn't have > 60%
turnout in any election in at least the last 2 years.

> - Tobias

-- 
Regards,

Jorge Vicetto (jmbsvicetto) - jmbsvicetto at gentoo dot org
Gentoo- forums / Userrel / Devrel / SPARC / KDE

Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Luca Barbato]

Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto wrote:
> I have a few ideas about this that I'll have to put in writing and share
> later, but let me start by proposing that for such a change we require
> the support of at least 2/3 of the devs that vote *and* a minimum of 1/3
> of all devs.

I'd use absolute majority even if it is more strict.

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero