Re: [gentoo-dev] Democracy: No silver bullet

[Ferris McCormick <fmccor@gentoo.org>]

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On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 09:50 +0100, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> Hi Donnie,
> 

Lots of interesting material in this thread, and I haven't come close to
processing it all.  I am briefly responding to two of Stuart's points
just to try to cut off further attempts to recall history.  For those of
you who want controversy, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you,
because I am just going to say "yes, I was there and you have it
right." :)



======
Lots of things snipped
=======

> > Around the same time, more cries of "Democracy!" and "Eliminate the
> > cabal!" forced developer relations (devrel) to come up with a huge,
> > bureaucratic, court-like system for disciplining pretty much the same
> > group of people again.
> 
> That's not how I remember it.  The court-like system was a direct
> consequence to the way that Ciaran's first suspension was handled.
> Plenty of folks felt that the way it was done left a very bad taste in
> the mouth, and the system that followed was an attempt to address
> those genuine problems.
> 

This is correct.

> > Everyone treated it like a world of extremes of
> > good and evil, where democracy is absolutely good and purity, and
> > anything other than that is evil. This added bureaucracy has essentially
> > rendered this side of devrel powerless, meaningless and useless.
> 
> I'm not sure how you can justify that statement.  To the best of my
> knowledge, that system has only been tested in full the once - when
> Brian was suspended from the project and Ciaran was expelled.
> 

This is also correct.  The procedure turned out to be very hard to
implement in practice, and I accept responsibility for some of the
difficulties.  However, we (devrel) did use it successfully with results
as Stuart remembers.

Since then, we have examined the conflict resolution policy pretty
carefully, and policy is under revision.  I do not believe the revised
policy is posted yet, but if we ever need to use such a process again,
it should move fairly but more quickly.
 



> Best regards,
> Stu
> --
> PS: Isn't it fascinating how different folks can live through the same
> events, but end up with different perspectives on it? :)
> 

Regards,
Ferris
-- 
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc)


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