[gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Tiziano Müller]

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After discussing this in #gentoo-council, I'd like to bring the topic
here for everyone to participate in the discussion:

While dberkholz does a great job of putting together an agenda,
organizing the meeting and even putting together a summary afterwards,
it seems that he's quiet busy lately (hence the missing logs/summary of
the last two meetings).
For my understanding this is too much of a burden for one person and I'd
propose that we have a changing President/Chairman (who'll prepare the
agenda) and a changing Secretary (who'll upload the logs and do the
summary). With the current ~100 meetings a year everyone of us would
have to do the summary and the agenda 14-15 times a year.

Since the Secretary is not really the most interesting job, I'd
volunteer to start and do it the next meeting.

Cheers,
Tiziano

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
Tiziano Müller
Gentoo Linux Developer
Areas of responsibility:
  Samba, PostgreSQL, CPP, Python, sysadmin
E-Mail     : dev-zero@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : F327 283A E769 2E36 18D5  4DE2 1B05 6A63 AE9C 1E30

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Petteri Räty]

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Tiziano Müller wrote:
> After discussing this in #gentoo-council, I'd like to bring the topic
> here for everyone to participate in the discussion:
> 
> While dberkholz does a great job of putting together an agenda,
> organizing the meeting and even putting together a summary afterwards,
> it seems that he's quiet busy lately (hence the missing logs/summary of
> the last two meetings).
> For my understanding this is too much of a burden for one person and I'd
> propose that we have a changing President/Chairman (who'll prepare the
> agenda) and a changing Secretary (who'll upload the logs and do the
> summary). With the current ~100 meetings a year everyone of us would
> have to do the summary and the agenda 14-15 times a year.
> 

We only have meetings every two weeks so we only have a quarter of what
you are saying.

> Since the Secretary is not really the most interesting job, I'd
> volunteer to start and do it the next meeting.
> 

I agree that having a dedicated secretary would be prudent.

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 10:26 Fri 06 Feb     , Tiziano Müller wrote:
> While dberkholz does a great job of putting together an agenda,
> organizing the meeting and even putting together a summary afterwards,
> it seems that he's quiet busy lately (hence the missing logs/summary of
> the last two meetings).
> For my understanding this is too much of a burden for one person and I'd
> propose that we have a changing President/Chairman (who'll prepare the
> agenda) and a changing Secretary (who'll upload the logs and do the
> summary). With the current ~100 meetings a year everyone of us would
> have to do the summary and the agenda 14-15 times a year.

To provide some context, I basically began doing these two roles by 
default when I was first elected to the council, since nobody else was 
particularly interested.

I agree that splitting president and secretary into separate roles is a 
great idea. I feel strongly that rotating these positions often will 
result in both roles being ineffective, because it takes time to get 
even decent at either of them. Does anyone want to return to the 4-hour 
meetings we used to have?

To make these most effective, I propose that they be chosen once per 
election period by council vote, beginning with the next election. If 
only one person is interested in either role, that person gets it. Also 
if either spot opens up, we can hold an election for it. For example, I 
am happy to "vacate" the secretary role because as Tiziano said, I've 
been falling behind on it lately, so we could have a quick vote on the 
newly open spot.

By rotating over a longer period, we ensure that the opportunity is 
available for new people, but we don't rotate so often that nobody ever 
gets things completely figured out.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 14:12:29 -0800
Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I agree that splitting president and secretary into separate roles is
> a great idea. I feel strongly that rotating these positions often
> will result in both roles being ineffective, because it takes time to
> get even decent at either of them. Does anyone want to return to the
> 4-hour meetings we used to have?

Does returning to 4-hour meetings mean things will no longer keep on
getting postponed for 'further discussion' that will never happen
because the meeting ran one second over its allocated time?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 22:18 Fri 06 Feb     , Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 14:12:29 -0800
> Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > I agree that splitting president and secretary into separate roles is
> > a great idea. I feel strongly that rotating these positions often
> > will result in both roles being ineffective, because it takes time to
> > get even decent at either of them. Does anyone want to return to the
> > 4-hour meetings we used to have?
> 
> Does returning to 4-hour meetings mean things will no longer keep on
> getting postponed for 'further discussion' that will never happen
> because the meeting ran one second over its allocated time?

If they never happen, apparently the people desiring discussion don't 
care enough to continue bringing it up on the list ...

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 14:33:44 -0800
Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Does returning to 4-hour meetings mean things will no longer keep on
> > getting postponed for 'further discussion' that will never happen
> > because the meeting ran one second over its allocated time?
> 
> If they never happen, apparently the people desiring discussion don't 
> care enough to continue bringing it up on the list ...

So you suggest that when the Council postpones something for further
discussion, the Council does in fact not desire further discussion?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 22:37 Fri 06 Feb     , Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 14:33:44 -0800
> Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > > Does returning to 4-hour meetings mean things will no longer keep on
> > > getting postponed for 'further discussion' that will never happen
> > > because the meeting ran one second over its allocated time?
> > 
> > If they never happen, apparently the people desiring discussion don't 
> > care enough to continue bringing it up on the list ...
> 
> So you suggest that when the Council postpones something for further
> discussion, the Council does in fact not desire further discussion?

I am trying to say that in the generic sense, people who want something 
to happen need to drive that change.

Perhaps it needs to be made clear when further discussion should be 
initiated by the people who want the discussion to happen.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Tiziano Müller]

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Am Freitag, den 06.02.2009, 14:12 -0800 schrieb Donnie Berkholz:
> On 10:26 Fri 06 Feb     , Tiziano Müller wrote:
> > While dberkholz does a great job of putting together an agenda,
> > organizing the meeting and even putting together a summary afterwards,
> > it seems that he's quiet busy lately (hence the missing logs/summary of
> > the last two meetings).
> > For my understanding this is too much of a burden for one person and I'd
> > propose that we have a changing President/Chairman (who'll prepare the
> > agenda) and a changing Secretary (who'll upload the logs and do the
> > summary). With the current ~100 meetings a year everyone of us would
> > have to do the summary and the agenda 14-15 times a year.
> 
> To provide some context, I basically began doing these two roles by 
> default when I was first elected to the council, since nobody else was 
> particularly interested.
> 
> I agree that splitting president and secretary into separate roles is a 
> great idea. I feel strongly that rotating these positions often will 
> result in both roles being ineffective, because it takes time to get 
> even decent at either of them. Does anyone want to return to the 4-hour 
> meetings we used to have?

Can you maybe outline the tasks the Secretary has to do besides
uploading the log and generate a summary and where it gets complicated?
Because I currently can't immagine where these tasks need much of a
training.
But we can also decide that everyone does it four times in a row to make
sure people don't take it in stride.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
Tiziano Müller
Gentoo Linux Developer, Council Member
Areas of responsibility:
  Samba, PostgreSQL, CPP, Python, sysadmin
E-Mail     : dev-zero@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : F327 283A E769 2E36 18D5  4DE2 1B05 6A63 AE9C 1E30

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 11:01 Sat 07 Feb     , Tiziano Müller wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 06.02.2009, 14:12 -0800 schrieb Donnie Berkholz:
> > I agree that splitting president and secretary into separate roles 
> > is a great idea. I feel strongly that rotating these positions often 
> > will result in both roles being ineffective, because it takes time 
> > to get even decent at either of them. Does anyone want to return to 
> > the 4-hour meetings we used to have?
> 
> Can you maybe outline the tasks the Secretary has to do besides 
> uploading the log and generate a summary and where it gets 
> complicated? Because I currently can't immagine where these tasks need 
> much of a training.

That depends on whether you just ramble on and write stuff or whether 
you communicate clearly, concisely, and accurately. Writing things for 
the appropriate audience in a way that tells them only what they want to 
know and doesn't waste their time with extra info is nontrivial, in the 
same way as writing a clean ebuild is. Anyone can write an ebuild, but I 
sure wouldn't add most people's first tries to the main tree.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 10:26 Fri 06 Feb     , Tiziano Müller wrote:
> While dberkholz does a great job of putting together an agenda, 
> organizing the meeting and even putting together a summary afterwards, 
> it seems that he's quite busy lately

Just wanted to comment on this. The reason I have been dumping some 
responsibilities (packages, teams, etc) is so I can spend more time on 
the council, and other things that I think will help all of Gentoo, like 
a DVCS conversion. So I do expect to have more time for this.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Tiziano Müller]

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Am Freitag, den 06.02.2009, 14:17 -0800 schrieb Donnie Berkholz:
> On 10:26 Fri 06 Feb     , Tiziano Müller wrote:
> > While dberkholz does a great job of putting together an agenda, 
> > organizing the meeting and even putting together a summary afterwards, 
> > it seems that he's quite busy lately
> 
> Just wanted to comment on this. The reason I have been dumping some 
> responsibilities (packages, teams, etc) is so I can spend more time on 
> the council, and other things that I think will help all of Gentoo, like 
> a DVCS conversion. 
Yes, please start that discussion! I'm probably not the only one wanting to get rid
of CVS. Probably we should continue that discussion on the -dev ml, but
do you know the state of sparse-checkout support in git? Patches are
floating around since September 2008, but last thing I know is that they
still are not included.


-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
Tiziano Müller
Gentoo Linux Developer, Council Member
Areas of responsibility:
  Samba, PostgreSQL, CPP, Python, sysadmin
E-Mail     : dev-zero@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : F327 283A E769 2E36 18D5  4DE2 1B05 6A63 AE9C 1E30

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 09:55 Tue 10 Feb     , Tiziano Müller wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 06.02.2009, 14:17 -0800 schrieb Donnie Berkholz:
> > Just wanted to comment on this. The reason I have been dumping some 
> > responsibilities (packages, teams, etc) is so I can spend more time 
> > on the council, and other things that I think will help all of 
> > Gentoo, like a DVCS conversion.
>
> Yes, please start that discussion! I'm probably not the only one 
> wanting to get rid of CVS. Probably we should continue that discussion 
> on the -dev ml, but do you know the state of sparse-checkout support 
> in git? Patches are floating around since September 2008, but last 
> thing I know is that they still are not included.

Discussion has been ongoing on the gentoo-scm list for some time now. 
Join it if you haven't been following along and want to.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Roy Bamford]

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On 2009.02.06 09:26, Tiziano Müller wrote:
> After discussing this in #gentoo-council, I'd like to bring the topic
> here for everyone to participate in the discussion:
> 
> While dberkholz does a great job of putting together an agenda,
> organizing the meeting and even putting together a summary 
> afterwards,
> it seems that he's quiet busy lately (hence the missing logs/summary
> of
> the last two meetings).
[snip]
> 
> Since the Secretary is not really the most interesting job, I'd
> volunteer to start and do it the next meeting.
> 
> Cheers,
> Tiziano
> 
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> Tiziano Müller
> Gentoo Linux Developer
> Areas of responsibility:
>   Samba, PostgreSQL, CPP, Python, sysadmin
> E-Mail     : dev-zero@gentoo.org
> GnuPG FP   : F327 283A E769 2E36 18D5  4DE2 1B05 6A63 AE9C 1E30
> 

Team,

There is no need for the secretary to be a member of the council as 
long as the person in that role takes no part in the councils decision 
making process.

The council could recruit a secretary from outside of themselves, or 
even outside of gentoo. An external recruit would need to become a 
gentoo staff member to be really useful, so they could have commit 
access to coucil web space.

The Foundation has seen all that happen.

- -- 
Regards,

Roy Bamford
(NeddySeagoon) a member of
gentoo-ops
forum-mods
treecleaners
trustees
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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Thomas Anderson]

On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 10:20:07AM +0000, Roy Bamford wrote:
> 
> There is no need for the secretary to be a member of the council as 
> long as the person in that role takes no part in the councils decision 
> making process.

If the council thinks this is a worthwhile thing to do, I would very
much like to be the council's lackey^H^H^H^H^H^H secretary.

Thomas

Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 10:20 Sat 07 Feb     , Roy Bamford wrote:
> There is no need for the secretary to be a member of the council as 
> long as the person in that role takes no part in the councils decision 
> making process.
> 
> The council could recruit a secretary from outside of themselves, or 
> even outside of gentoo. An external recruit would need to become a 
> gentoo staff member to be really useful, so they could have commit 
> access to coucil web space.
> 
> The Foundation has seen all that happen.

This option works for me. In fact it's probably better that a person is 
relatively less involved, since they'd hopefully be able to write a bit 
more objectively. Also council members aren't distracted during the 
meeting with taking notes.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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Re: [gentoo-council] Secretary & President

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 23:34 Tue 10 Feb     , Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On 10:20 Sat 07 Feb     , Roy Bamford wrote:
> > There is no need for the secretary to be a member of the council as 
> > long as the person in that role takes no part in the councils decision 
> > making process.
> > 
> > The council could recruit a secretary from outside of themselves, or 
> > even outside of gentoo. An external recruit would need to become a 
> > gentoo staff member to be really useful, so they could have commit 
> > access to coucil web space.
> > 
> > The Foundation has seen all that happen.
> 
> This option works for me. In fact it's probably better that a person is 
> relatively less involved, since they'd hopefully be able to write a bit 
> more objectively. Also council members aren't distracted during the 
> meeting with taking notes.

I've invited tanderson to come to today's meeting. I would like to cover 
this topic first so that we can figure out who's taking notes for the 
remainder of the meeting.

At least initially, I would like to require a council review period 
(let's say 1 day after it's sent) before summaries go out.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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