[gentoo-dev] Democracy: No silver bullet

[gentoo-dev] Democracy: No silver bullet

[Donnie Berkholz]

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I just posted this to my blog [1], but I know you don't all read it so I
wanted to post it here as well. Do read all the way through. I very
rarely write anything this long, and when I do, it's something I feel
very strongly about.

I started my fourth year as a Gentoo developer in June, and Gentoo's
changed a lot since I started back in 2003. We've become a drastically
more democratic organization. But the question remains — _Is this a good
thing?_

When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy
years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on
the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we
can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on
pretty much whatever they feel like.

When I joined, Daniel Robbins was in charge, period. Seemant Kulleen and
Jon Portnoy were basically his lieutenants. What Daniel said was what
happened, and woe to anyone who angered him. This generally worked out
pretty well, but _as Gentoo grew, it didn't scale_. Everything
significant still had to go through Daniel for personal approval.

Shortly after I finished training and became an "official" developer,
Gentoo gained its first real structure via Gentoo Linux Enhancement
Proposal (GLEP) 4 — "Gentoo top-level management structure proposal".
The GLEP process itself was quite new then; GLEP 4 was really only the
second proposed GLEP (the first two were details related to the GLEP
process) and the first one that was accepted. _Its goal was to improve
communication and coordination as well as increase accountability_.

GLEP 4 formalized a hierarchy of so-called "top-level" projects —
between 5 and 10 major areas into which everything in Gentoo could be
divided. Daniel appointed the original project managers, who served
under him.

Democratic elections entered Gentoo when we realized that we needed to
create a new top-level project for all the desktop work, because it
didn't fit into any existing project. Since managers already voted
amongst themselves on GLEPs, it seemed like a natural extension for them
to vote on a new manager. The call for nominations is archived online.
I'd been a developer for around six months at this point, and by then I
was the lead X maintainer. Brandon Hale was active in maintaining window
managers and other miscellaneous applets and such. Turns out that the
vote tied, so we became co-managers.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of a very
slippery slope.

Gentoo used to be a courteous, friendly development community where
nobody was afraid to speak his mind for fear of insult and injury. I see
a clear correlation between the growth in democracy and the departure of
courtesy. Once people are empowered to vote on every decision, rather
than just having their discussion taken as input in a decision, they get
a lot more vehement, argumentative and forceful about getting their way.
_Flamewars and loud arguments going on for hundreds of posts have become
commonplace, despite the occasional outcry_. Here's one such outcry, on
March 20, 2006, to the private developers' list:

 What I've seen for the last 18 months or more is a general degeneration
 in the attitudes of developers for their fellow developers. When I
 joined, the attitude of people was friendly and welcoming. I screwed
 up a couple of times. I didn't get my ass handed to me. I got picked
 up, and comforted. And taught and tutored. ...

 So, we split from the Gentoo Technologies company, to a community owned
 Gentoo Foundation. And now everyone was empowered. Everyone has a
 voice. Some louder than others. The unfortunate thing is that with
 this empowerment came a bit of assholishness. With rare exception,
 we're pretty much all guilty of that. Someone makes a spelling error in
 a commit, and that leads to flamefests on irc and mailing lists and
 blog entries. And so on, ad nauseum.

 Frankly, I'm sick of it. It's burning people out. We're burning
 ourselves out by being this way. It's time to stop this shit. To
 everyone reading this, you've arrived at the important bit. From now,
 please try this little thing. When you're on the mailing lists or the
 fora or irc channels or in /query or somehow in the gentoo 'verse,
 please try, just try, to be a little bit nicer to the people with whom
 you're interacting. That's all. Have a little respect (even if not
 deserved!). Listen a little. Hold back the snide comment, the
 sarcastic remark. I don't mean to get all Oprah on you all, but I hope
 you see my point -- just be nice for a change.

The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other
developers being happy with any given situation.

The problem got so bad that our Developer Relations team wrote up an
etiquette guide. Unsurprisingly, the same vocal minority that generally
behaves like an ass and violates said etiquette guide erupted in flames
over it, and it ended up fading into an existing but largely irrelevant
piece of writing.

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. 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.

All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming more
influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about its
members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun
and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.

How can we do anything about this? As people such as Mike Auty have
pointed out, the problem could be with the increasing barrage of rules,
regulations and policies to which we're expected to adhere. Take a look
at the FreeBSD committers' rules. Rule one is "Respect other
committers," and rule two is "Respect other contributors." Take a look
at the importance of courtesy and care to avoid creating long-term
disagreements in rule one:

 Being able to work together long term is this project's greatest asset,
 one far more important than any set of changes to the code, and turning
 arguments about code into issues that affect our long-term ability to
 work harmoniously together is just not worth the trade-off by any
 conceivable stretch of the imagination. ...

 First calm down, then think about how to communicate in the most
 effective fashion for convincing the other person(s) that your side of
 the argument is correct, do not just blow off some steam so you can
 feel better in the short term at the cost of a long-term flame war. Not
 only is this very bad “energy economics”, but repeated displays of
 public aggression which impair our ability to work well together will
 be dealt with severely by the project leadership and may result in
 suspension or termination of your commit privileges.

Or how about the Ubuntu Code of Conduct? The first two rules are "Be
considerate" and "Be respectful." Again, note that these rules are
actually enforced. As has been pointed out on the Gentoo development
list, you can have respect without courtesy. But Gentoo needs both! One
just isn't good enough.

But what about Gentoo? We don't have any overriding principles like this
from which all of the standards for behavior derive. Instead, we have a
large document explaining specifically and in detail what's allowed and
what isn't, and even that is ignored. Because of the bureaucracy and the
lack of respect for devrel's role, we're effectively powerless to do
anything when people behave in a way for which the FreeBSD project's
leadership would kick them to the curb.

I'm not the only one to suggest that a democracy isn't the most
productive way to run Gentoo. When people wanted to change in how Gentoo
was run, democracy was the only option considered, rather than simply
changing the leaders. There's an ongoing assumption that if problems
exist, it must be somewhere in the structure rather than in the people.

If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
to do anything about it.

Thanks,
Donnie

P.S. -- if you want the links, you can get them from my blog post.

1. http://spyderous.livejournal.com/80869.html


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

[Daniel Ostrow]

<snip a bunch>

> If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
> from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
> would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
> to do anything about it.

</snip a bunch>

First of suffice it to say that many a time in the past (and that is sad
to say as I have only been a dev for just over two years) I have been
privy to whispered murmurs that happen in back rooms behind closed
doors. These whispers have always come about when one of the
aforementioned log threads have come about and the penultimate
conclusion of every one is that the problem that Gentoo presently faces
is in fact too much freedom.

Part of me wants to believe that you are right in that the only way to
get back to a place where there is true vision and power behind the
Gentoo name is to get community buy in and part of me wants to hunker
down and accept the likely reality that the only way to get back to a
point of health is to start laying the "smack down". Now I don't mean to
say that there is any negative connotation to that process...just that
those that are elected to be in charge are inherently trusted to do
their best for the future of Gentoo and that implicit in that trust is
an understanding that they may have to take dirty and potentially
unpopular roads to maintain that health. Bitching and complaining be
damned; part of what paralyzes us is an acquiescence to that vocal
minority. None of us want to deal with hearing the outcry so no-one does
what is needed. Basically I'm saying that while some level of acceptance
has to come from the community as a whole and some level of it has to
come from the top down whatever the outcome.

The Council has to be willing to be the body whose job is to maintain
the long lasting heath and happiness of the developer community, that
community is what Gentoo is.

In addition to the conclusion that too much freedom has entered the
life-blood that drives Gentoo it is also often the case that from the
stance of upper management there is not enough freedom given. Part of
what paralyzes the Council and devrel and any other historical body that
has tried to keep Gentoo healthy is that there is an understanding that
they can only act as a whole...as individuals none of them have power as
there is fear that a rouge person in a position to abuse their
responsibility will do so. It is my contention that with a body of
multiple individuals such as the Council that there would be the ability
to recognize and mitigate the damage done by such a rogue. I'd posit
that by voting someone onto the council you are saying that you trust
them enough to carry this duty on their shoulders. The Council itself
should not be just a technical body to validate the merits of GLERs
and/or emerging projects, it (or some other yet to be established group)
has to carry the solemn duty of carrying Gentoo into the future,
nurturing it as only a parent could.

I'd also wager that allowing those who have been trusted to be in power
to act a little on their own would provide the capability for that group
to react more quickly, there wouldn't need to be emergency meetings, you
wouldn't need to push off decisions for a full month and in general as
there would be more activity there would also be more transparency as
the actions of the group would be visible.

All in all I suppose that is the platform that I am running on for this
years Council...take it for what you will but that is where I stand.

Thanks,

--Dan  

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Joshua Jackson]

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Daniel Ostrow wrote:
> <snip a bunch>
>
>> If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
>> from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
>> would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
>> to do anything about it.
>
> </snip a bunch>
>
> First of suffice it to say that many a time in the past (and that is sad
> to say as I have only been a dev for just over two years) I have been
> privy to whispered murmurs that happen in back rooms behind closed
> doors. These whispers have always come about when one of the
> aforementioned log threads have come about and the penultimate
> conclusion of every one is that the problem that Gentoo presently faces
> is in fact too much freedom.
I think we all hear some of the back room mummers depending on who we
talk to. Some of us hear more then others, some less. However, we all
have friends that we feel that we can talk to fairly freely about
these issues.

>  Bitching and complaining be
> damned; part of what paralyzes us is an acquiescence to that vocal
> minority. None of us want to deal with hearing the outcry so no-one does
> what is needed. Basically I'm saying that while some level of acceptance
> has to come from the community as a whole and some level of it has to
> come from the top down whatever the outcome.
I'm going to call bullshit on this one, I don't believe you have 4
fours (i have one!).
Erm, what this isn't the game of bullshit? Oh well...erm *runs* Its
not that no one wants to do anything, its that they've seen that if
someone does stand up and take on the vocal minority. That being that
they are the ones that actually get beaten up by the very ones who
acquiescence and allow that minority to continue to do what they do.
If you have an issue, stand up and quite honestly, have the balls to
take the issue up with the people you have it with. I full expect
people to come talk to me if they have issues, with me or anyone. I'm
willing to listen either way. I'd like to think everyone else feels
the same.
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Democracy: No silver bullet

[Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen]

On Thursday 24 August 2006 02:17, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
<snip>

> When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy
> years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on
> the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we
> can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on
> pretty much whatever they feel like.
Some like it that way others don't I think that is normal when you have 
elections. If more developers will work for a global vision we will have one.

> The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other
> developers being happy with any given situation.
Yeah, that is a problem. Simple rules and stronger enforcement of those rules 
would be great.

> All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming more
> influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about its
> members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun
> and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.
Then vote for someone else.

>  Being able to work together long term is this project's greatest asset,
>  one far more important than any set of changes to the code, and turning
>  arguments about code into issues that affect our long-term ability to
>  work harmoniously together is just not worth the trade-off by any
>  conceivable stretch of the imagination. ...
I agree. If we can't come up with many global technical objectives this could 
be a good candidate .

> I'm not the only one to suggest that a democracy isn't the most
> productive way to run Gentoo. When people wanted to change in how Gentoo
> was run, democracy was the only option considered, rather than simply
> changing the leaders. There's an ongoing assumption that if problems
> exist, it must be somewhere in the structure rather than in the people.
Democracy is not just democracy it can be run in many ways.

> If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
> from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
> would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
> to do anything about it.
I was only a dev for a few months with drobbins so I don't really have any 
personal experience from that part of the Gentoo history but I definately 
would not like to abandon the Foundation and work under some arbitrary chief.

Going backwards is not the solution.

-- 
Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen (Jaervosz)
Gentoo Linux Security Team
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Wernfried Haas]

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One of the problems with democracy is that people pretty much get what
they want. If there was enough support for devrel to actually execute
the current policies (like preventing developers from calling people
names on this list), it would happen. However it seems to me that not
many people would back something like that up, and it doesn't seem to
happen.


I rather have the current process with all its problems than one
single ruler deciding stuff, even if he decides good - or like a total
moron, you just never know with kings.
The king is dead, long live the council!

cheers,
	Wernfried

-- 
Wernfried Haas (amne) - amne at gentoo dot org
Gentoo Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org
IRC: #gentoo-forums on freenode - email: forum-mods at gentoo dot org

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

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen wrote:
> On Thursday 24 August 2006 02:17, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming more
>> influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about its
>> members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun
>> and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.
> Then vote for someone else.

What? This doesn't make any sense. People bitching and moaning and
screaming all over -dev until no one else has any interest in pursuing
anything has nothing to do with who I vote for.

>> If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
>> from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
>> would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
>> to do anything about it.
> I was only a dev for a few months with drobbins so I don't really have any 
> personal experience from that part of the Gentoo history but I definately 
> would not like to abandon the Foundation and work under some arbitrary chief.

This has nothing to do with the foundation, it manages our intellectual
property and finances.

I'd rather work under an arbitrary leader than no leader at all.

Thanks,
Donnie


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

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Wernfried Haas wrote:
> I rather have the current process with all its problems than one
> single ruler deciding stuff, even if he decides good - or like a total
> moron, you just never know with kings.
> The king is dead, long live the council!

The council doesn't actually do anything AFAICT, it just "approves" GLEP
decisions that have already been made. So in effect we have no leadership.

Thanks,
Donnie


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

[Wernfried Haas]

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On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 12:54:23AM -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> The council doesn't actually do anything AFAICT, it just "approves" GLEP
> decisions that have already been made. So in effect we have no leadership.

Suspending sunrise was a decision, as was unsuspending it. However i
agree that currently their main role is approving GLEPs and other
decisions which makes them official Gentoo decisions.
If that's a good or bad thing (tm) depends on the POV, i mainly think
it's good to have it like that and no leader whatsoever.

cheers,
	Wernfried

-- 
Wernfried Haas (amne) - amne at gentoo dot org
Gentoo Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org
IRC: #gentoo-forums on freenode - email: forum-mods at gentoo dot org

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

[Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen]

On Thursday 24 August 2006 09:52, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen wrote:
> What? This doesn't make any sense. People bitching and moaning and
> screaming all over -dev until no one else has any interest in pursuing
> anything has nothing to do with who I vote for.
No but in a democracy people who did "a splendid job of becoming more
 influential" usually did it through votes somehow. If you just mean that it 
discourage others from doing anything, you're right about that.

> This has nothing to do with the foundation, it manages our intellectual
> property and finances.
So you would keep "democracy" for the foundation?

-- 
Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen (Jaervosz)
Gentoo Linux Security Team
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi Donnie,

On 8/24/06, Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I started my fourth year as a Gentoo developer in June, and Gentoo's
> changed a lot since I started back in 2003. We've become a drastically
> more democratic organization. But the question remains — _Is this a good
> thing?_

Oh yes.  It corrected major inbalances, and added significant
credibility to our claim to be a community-based distro.

> When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy
> years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on
> the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we
> can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on
> pretty much whatever they feel like.

We've had a global vision for where Gentoo is going from before I
joined - Gentoo is here to create a source-based distribution where
each package is as close to what $UPSTREAM intended it to be as
possible.  We're not trying to take $UPSTREAM packages and innovate
with them - we're here to do a first class job of packaging them up.

It's a somewhat Daoist approach, and as such is completely alien to
most Western thinking (which is based around modelling the world to
our thoughts, instead of modelling ourselves to our world).  Don't be
afraid of it.  In business terms, it's out "sweet spot" - it's the
place we occupy that our more commercial competitors simply can't make
in-roads on.  It gives us a unique identity.

"Everyone just working on pretty much what they feel like" is Gentoo's
other major strength.  What we work on is what is important to us.  We
work on what we need, and what we're motivated to do.  Do you know how
many companies wish they could say the same about their workforces?

The flip side is that it's important we have a diverse and changing
developer team.  Our strength is also our weakness.  If you get too
much of an inbalance in the profiles and interests of the developers,
you'll end up with a distro that's equally inbalanced.  And it will be
that which eventually kills off Gentoo.  For example, if the work and
decision making was dominated mainly by students or research academics
- folks it could be said have no experience or understanding of the
demands of the corporate workplace - eventually Gentoo would warp and
turn into something that was too eclectic to fit in corporates.  And
the same is equally true the other way around.

> When I joined, Daniel Robbins was in charge, period. Seemant Kulleen and
> Jon Portnoy were basically his lieutenants. What Daniel said was what
> happened, and woe to anyone who angered him. This generally worked out
> pretty well, but _as Gentoo grew, it didn't scale_. Everything
> significant still had to go through Daniel for personal approval.

Scaling wasn't the only issue.  There were too many topics -
especially when it came to servers and web-related issues - that were
just beyond Daniel's experience and understanding.  You also left Kurt
out as one of the lieutenants.

> Shortly after I finished training and became an "official" developer,
> Gentoo gained its first real structure via Gentoo Linux Enhancement
> Proposal (GLEP) 4 — "Gentoo top-level management structure proposal".
> The GLEP process itself was quite new then; GLEP 4 was really only the
> second proposed GLEP (the first two were details related to the GLEP
> process) and the first one that was accepted. _Its goal was to improve
> communication and coordination as well as increase accountability_.
>
> GLEP 4 formalized a hierarchy of so-called "top-level" projects —
> between 5 and 10 major areas into which everything in Gentoo could be
> divided. Daniel appointed the original project managers, who served
> under him.

That hierarchy was always flawed.  Server-related matters never had a
seat at the top table, and ended up being represented by the base
systems manager.  That actually turned out quite well for us, because
folks simply left us alone to get on with things.

> Democratic elections entered Gentoo when we realized that we needed to
> create a new top-level project for all the desktop work, because it
> didn't fit into any existing project. Since managers already voted
> amongst themselves on GLEPs, it seemed like a natural extension for them
> to vote on a new manager. The call for nominations is archived online.
> I'd been a developer for around six months at this point, and by then I
> was the lead X maintainer. Brandon Hale was active in maintaining window
> managers and other miscellaneous applets and such. Turns out that the
> vote tied, so we became co-managers.
>
> I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of a very
> slippery slope.
>
> Gentoo used to be a courteous, friendly development community where
> nobody was afraid to speak his mind for fear of insult and injury. I see
> a clear correlation between the growth in democracy and the departure of
> courtesy. Once people are empowered to vote on every decision, rather
> than just having their discussion taken as input in a decision, they get
> a lot more vehement, argumentative and forceful about getting their way.
> _Flamewars and loud arguments going on for hundreds of posts have become
> commonplace, despite the occasional outcry_.

Except ... even today, folks simply aren't empowered to vote on every
decision (other than by voting with their feet).  Your hypothesis
seems to be based on a flawed model of how Gentoo works, I'm afraid.

> Here's one such outcry, on
> March 20, 2006, to the private developers' list:
>
>  What I've seen for the last 18 months or more is a general degeneration
>  in the attitudes of developers for their fellow developers. When I
>  joined, the attitude of people was friendly and welcoming. I screwed
>  up a couple of times. I didn't get my ass handed to me. I got picked
>  up, and comforted. And taught and tutored. ...
>
>  So, we split from the Gentoo Technologies company, to a community owned
>  Gentoo Foundation. And now everyone was empowered. Everyone has a
>  voice. Some louder than others. The unfortunate thing is that with
>  this empowerment came a bit of assholishness. With rare exception,
>  we're pretty much all guilty of that. Someone makes a spelling error in
>  a commit, and that leads to flamefests on irc and mailing lists and
>  blog entries. And so on, ad nauseum.
>
>  Frankly, I'm sick of it. It's burning people out. We're burning
>  ourselves out by being this way. It's time to stop this shit. To
>  everyone reading this, you've arrived at the important bit. From now,
>  please try this little thing. When you're on the mailing lists or the
>  fora or irc channels or in /query or somehow in the gentoo 'verse,
>  please try, just try, to be a little bit nicer to the people with whom
>  you're interacting. That's all. Have a little respect (even if not
>  deserved!). Listen a little. Hold back the snide comment, the
>  sarcastic remark. I don't mean to get all Oprah on you all, but I hope
>  you see my point -- just be nice for a change.

> The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other
> developers being happy with any given situation.

This is hardly a new phenomenon invented by Gentoo.  You'll find
tonnes about this under topics such as "growing pains", and also
"management by ego".

The basic cause always comes down to weak or non-existent management.
Your very best folks are good because (rightly or wrongly) they fill
perceived vaccuums.  They wander out of their own areas because they
genuinely care, and they see a situation where they feel they can help
out more junior folks.

When these wanderers get there, they can be characterised as having
one of two agendas.  They either absorb the agenda of the folks
they've gone to help, and they do their best to make that happen.  Or
- and sadly this is the case with certain vocal folks in Gentoo - they
instead seek to impose their pre-conceived ideas and their agenda on
the folks that they've gone to help.  Although the motives are sound -
they genuinely care - the whole imposing just gets folks backs up, and
is often made worse by poor personal communication skills (made worse
by our reliance on electronic communications) and by the fact that
many of the people acting like this frankly aren't good enough to
bring the right ideas across.

This whole thing is often described as management by ego, and arises
primarily because there's no effective structure to contain these
wanders, and ensure that they fuck off when they overstep the mark.

> The problem got so bad that our Developer Relations team wrote up an
> etiquette guide. Unsurprisingly, the same vocal minority that generally
> behaves like an ass and violates said etiquette guide erupted in flames
> over it, and it ended up fading into an existing but largely irrelevant
> piece of writing.

That's true, but again it's not the whole story.  The original
complaints against the etiquette guide (even from the vocal minority)
were rightly about the way this was done.  No offense to Deedra and
Tim, but the whole process of writing and introducing that guide
should be held up for time immemorial as an example of how not to work
with a volunteer community.

> 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.

> 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.

> All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming more
> influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about its
> members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun
> and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.

Can you back this up with three examples in the last twelve months
where this has happened?

> How can we do anything about this?

You start at the beginning, which is recruitment.

Many companies and organisations are guilty of looking at recruitment
simply at the superficial level - that it's purpose is to increase
head-count, to put bums on seats, and to make sure that there are
enough shoulders to share the load.  That is something that has to be
taken into account, but it ignores the fundamentals.

The fundamentals of recruitment are about enlargening your internal
community (ie, your workforce, or in our case, our army of volunteer
developers).  It's about bringing people in so that they accept and
respect what your community is, how it works, and why.  You actively
mentor them, because it takes an average of six months for a new
recruit to "get it".  You set things up so that they are automatically
out the door unless they "get it".  "Getting it" isn't just about the
technical aspect of the work.  The social side is *just* as important
- but unfortunately, that's a difficult thing for the kind of
volunteers we attract to understand or accept (as any IT manager can
attest to ;)

Your internal community needs a shared culture.  When the shit hits
the fan, it's that shared culture which holds everything together
until you pull through.

Our problem is that we have a critical mass of groups who do not share
a culture to bind them together, and drive them to overcome their
differences.

> As people such as Mike Auty have
> pointed out, the problem could be with the increasing barrage of rules,
> regulations and policies to which we're expected to adhere. Take a look
> at the FreeBSD committers' rules. Rule one is "Respect other
> committers," and rule two is "Respect other contributors." Take a look
> at the importance of courtesy and care to avoid creating long-term
> disagreements in rule one:
>
>  Being able to work together long term is this project's greatest asset,
>  one far more important than any set of changes to the code, and turning
>  arguments about code into issues that affect our long-term ability to
>  work harmoniously together is just not worth the trade-off by any
>  conceivable stretch of the imagination. ...
>
>  First calm down, then think about how to communicate in the most
>  effective fashion for convincing the other person(s) that your side of
>  the argument is correct, do not just blow off some steam so you can
>  feel better in the short term at the cost of a long-term flame war. Not
>  only is this very bad "energy economics", but repeated displays of
>  public aggression which impair our ability to work well together will
>  be dealt with severely by the project leadership and may result in
>  suspension or termination of your commit privileges.
 >
> Or how about the Ubuntu Code of Conduct? The first two rules are "Be
> considerate" and "Be respectful." Again, note that these rules are
> actually enforced. As has been pointed out on the Gentoo development
> list, you can have respect without courtesy. But Gentoo needs both! One
> just isn't good enough.

These are good points.

> But what about Gentoo? We don't have any overriding principles like this
> from which all of the standards for behavior derive. Instead, we have a
> large document explaining specifically and in detail what's allowed and
> what isn't, and even that is ignored. Because of the bureaucracy and the
> lack of respect for devrel's role, we're effectively powerless to do
> anything when people behave in a way for which the FreeBSD project's
> leadership would kick them to the curb.

Hrm.  Where is this lack of respect for devrel being displayed today?
What forms does this lack of respect take?  If there's a lack of
respect at the moment, it's not for devrel.

It's between individual developers, who either do not value each other
as people, or do not value each other as contributors.

A good way to sort that out is to get them together in the physical
world, and use group de-polarisation exercises to help folks
understand that their view of the world isn't the only view that is
valid.  This is why I'm hoping to see Gentoo establish a regular
international dev conference.  You'll find that the vast majority of
issues won't arise once folks actually know each other better - and
the personality clashes that are left are easier to see for what they
are.  (You can't eliminate all personality clashes, alas.)  And, we've
already proved that we _can_ (eventually) deal with the tiny minority
of genuine trouble makers who are left over.

Children create relationships based on friendship.  It's an adult
behaviour to create relationships based on trust.  In the main, the
vocal minority that you refer to several times here can be
characterised as acting like the former, rather than the later.

I'd also argue that we're _not_ powerless.  It wasn't pleasant, but
the old system has shown that we can deal with genuine trouble makers.
 But you can't have everyone get along with everyone else, either -
not in a enlargening community.  A larger group needs that diversity
in order to survive, and to flourish.

No offense to the FreeBSD world, but I'd rather be a part of the
larger Linux world - with a larger, but not always 100% harmonious
community - than part of the smaller FreeBSD world.

> I'm not the only one to suggest that a democracy isn't the most
> productive way to run Gentoo. When people wanted to change in how Gentoo
> was run, democracy was the only option considered, rather than simply
> changing the leaders. There's an ongoing assumption that if problems
> exist, it must be somewhere in the structure rather than in the people.

We don't have a democracy.  Gentoo is largely a workocracy (there must
be a better word for it ;), where the vast majority decisions are made
by the folks who actually do the work.

Folks don't vote on stuff.  To pick a recent example, none of the
folks who opposed Sunrise actually had any means to vote to prevent it
happening.  What they had to do was to lobby the council, who were the
only folks with a vote.

If we had actually tried a democracy (something I'm instinctively
against, but rationally am becoming more and more interested in), your
arguments would maybe carry some weight.  But, the clear fact of the
matter is that we haven't - and that leaves your arguments built on
sand.

> If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
> from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
> would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
> to do anything about it.

I'm naturally suspicious of anyone who seeks office on a platform of
talking about the need to beef up the powers of an unelected body (ie
devrel), and who does so using at best a partial playback of how we
got to where we are today, with arguments that are built on a
demonstrably flawed understanding of where we are today.

You've just lost my vote.

I'm not standing for election, but maybe someone who is would be
interested in investigating some ideas Sejo discussed with me when he
left us.  The summary is my own; hopefully I've captured Sejo's ideas
accurately.

*  Every staff member has to belong to a team.  You join a team by
being voted onto the team by the other members of the team.  They
don't vote you in, you can't join.
*  If you're not part of any team, your rights and privileges as a
staff member are automatically terminated.  There's no place to go to
appeal.
*  You can be voted off the team at any time.  The teams are self-managing.

I've heard of businesses having tried out similar schemes like this,
with strong success, but it's not an approach I've seen first hand, or
read much about.  I'd be very interested in exploring this one more.

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? :)

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

[Kevin F. Quinn]

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On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:50:04 +0100
"Stuart Herbert" <stuart.herbert@gmail.com> wrote:

> We've had a global vision for where Gentoo is going from before I
> joined - Gentoo is here to create a source-based distribution where
> each package is as close to what $UPSTREAM intended it to be as
> possible.  We're not trying to take $UPSTREAM packages and innovate
> with them - we're here to do a first class job of packaging them up.

While that's generally the case, it's not always true; in particular
the hardened project deliberately causes stuff to be built differently
to the way upstream expect.

This illustrates that there is more than one vision, and what's good
about Gentoo is that we can support different visions without having to
fork the whole of Gentoo.  The increased use of overlays helps to scale
this up.

>...
> We don't have a democracy.  Gentoo is largely a workocracy (there must
> be a better word for it ;), where the vast majority decisions are made
> by the folks who actually do the work.

Meritocracy, perhaps.

>...
> *  Every staff member has to belong to a team.  You join a team by
> being voted onto the team by the other members of the team.  They
> don't vote you in, you can't join.
> *  If you're not part of any team, your rights and privileges as a
> staff member are automatically terminated.  There's no place to go to
> appeal.
> *  You can be voted off the team at any time.  The teams are
> self-managing.

I figured this is pretty much how it works at the moment, just without
the formality.  You don't just attach yourself to a team and start
stomping over the work of that team - acceptability of what you do is
by consent of the team.  The lack of formality means that if the
team doesn't explicitly object to something you propose (e.g. what you
propose doesn't affect what the rest of the team do, or if it does
they don't care), you can just go ahead.  Your summary implies explicit
consent from the team would be needed, which I don't think would be a
good idea.

-- 
Kevin F. Quinn

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

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Thursday 24 August 2006 09:54, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> The council doesn't actually do anything AFAICT, it just "approves" GLEP
> decisions that have already been made. So in effect we have no leadership.

Well, to quote the council project page:

"The elected Gentoo Council decides on global issues and policies that affect 
multiple projects in Gentoo."

and from GLEP 19

"Global issues will be decided by an elected Gentoo council."

So yes, the council is not elected to rule into decisions of single Gentoo 
project decisions, unless it affects Gentoo globally. What "global issues" 
are can be argued about, though. Personally I see the council as our body to 
make decisions and wouldn't disagree to reword the base on which the council 
acts to give them explicitly the power to decide on whatever they feel they 
have to, if necessary - except being bound to have to be re-elected.


I'm not as long on board as you Donnie, but I don't think you're right with 
your implicit call that we need a benevolant dictator. There's simply no 
evidence, that this model would have done better with Gentoo's growth. I have 
at least one big point I could list, what went wrong, while Daniel Robbins 
was the lead. Ask me privately, if you're interested what I mean. I don't 
want to let others look bad or be the source of flaming.


Carsten

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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:54:23 -0700 Donnie Berkholz
<dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
| Wernfried Haas wrote:
| > I rather have the current process with all its problems than one
| > single ruler deciding stuff, even if he decides good - or like a
| > total moron, you just never know with kings.
| > The king is dead, long live the council!
| 
| The council doesn't actually do anything AFAICT, it just "approves"
| GLEP decisions that have already been made. So in effect we have no
| leadership.

And that is a large part of the problem. Were the council less
spineless, things might actually get done.

The problem with a dictatorship is that when the dictator screws up,
the damage is huge. The problem with a representative democracy --
especially when using Condorcet, which is highly biased in favour of
moderates -- is that nobody is prepared to do anything that's in any
way risky, controversial or useful.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail            : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk


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

[Lance Albertson]

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Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> I just posted this to my blog [1], but I know you don't all read it so I
> wanted to post it here as well. Do read all the way through. I very
> rarely write anything this long, and when I do, it's something I feel
> very strongly about.

<snip a bunch of good stuff>

> If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
> from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
> would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
> to do anything about it.

Amen brother.

I mentioned something similar about needing a single voice to help push
development in the right direction back in January. And sadly, I'm
seeing the same responses on your thread as I did on mine back then. Its
just to the point where there is a line dividing many developers on what
they think is the right way to run Gentoo. Looking at the folks we have
now, I seriously doubt we'll be able to fix it. The same problems we've
faced in the last year or so will just get worse, and eventually enough
good developers will leave that critical mass will be in effect.

Maybe its a cultural thing between some of us, or maybe its the
'pre-daniel' versus 'post-daniel' devs. I'm curious the demographics of
our active developers that were on prior to daniel's leaving compared to
those who joined after. To most of the recent active folks, they never
knew what it was like before. Hell, I just got on towards the tail end
of the daniel-era, so I don't have much validity in that realm myself!
But I do remember how it used to be and how well we did things and how
we usually respected each other in some fashion or another.

I'm afraid those days are in the past unless some kind of fork happens
where the folks who think we need a leader go their way and the folks
who prefer the leader-by-committee approach go their way. We all hate
forks, none of us have time for forks, but looking at the dividing line,
I don't see how we'll be able to compromise with out adding more
policies and BS.

Anyways, Donnie++

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
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ramereth/irc.freenode.net


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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 17:17:17 -0700 Donnie Berkholz
<dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
| The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other
| developers being happy with any given situation.

That's a somewhat dangerous claim to make, for several reasons.

Firstly, the vocal people are usually the ones who have a stake in an
issue. Most people don't care about an issue because they trust that
those who understand the issue and its implications will get it fixed.

Secondly, it's a good way of dismissing technical discussion. Coming up
with the right solution for a problem is often difficult, but doing so
can save huge amounts of effort later on.

Thirdly, it's a good way of dismissing anyone who happens to disagree
with you.

Fourthly, if the majority aren't vocal, how do you know what they want?

| The problem got so bad that our Developer Relations team wrote up an
| etiquette guide.

No no. That was a result of devrel being unable to address the real
issues that were affecting them (recruiting holdups, inconsistent and
far too low standards for people who did manage to get through the
system, complete neglect of the documentation they'd decided they'd
maintain), and needing to make it look like they were doing something.
It's often much easier to invent a problem where there is none
than it is to fix the real issues -- and doing so is a good way of
gaining popularity, at least for a while.

It's very easy to claim that "there are too many flamewars", even if
that isn't actually true. It's hard to claim "Portage needs replacing,
the tree has huge QA issues, several archs are horribly unmaintained and
too many developers don't have a clue what they're doing" because a)
they're difficult problems to address, b) if you do say them, Condorcet
ensures that you won't get elected and c) you might be expected to fix
them.

Most of these problems could be solved if we had a council that was far
less spineless, a council that's prepared to address the *real* issues
rather than doing nothing, a council that shows leadership and provides
direction where it's needed without screwing things up where it's not.
The problem with the old system was devrel's habit of holding secret
meetings, Daniel's habit of going off and deciding new directions
(catalyst, genkernel, ...) without consulting those who understood the
issues involved and so on. The problem with the new system is that it
encourages fence sitting and stagnation, and draws focus away from the
real issues and onto populist mud flinging.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail            : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk


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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:42:48 -0500 Lance Albertson
<ramereth@gentoo.org> wrote:
| I'm afraid those days are in the past unless some kind of fork happens
| where the folks who think we need a leader go their way and the folks
| who prefer the leader-by-committee approach go their way.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. A strong council can provide the
equivalent of a single leader without the problems of what to do when
the leader gets sick, and with less chance of a screwup because of
increased discussion.

The problem, of course, is how to get a strong council...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail            : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk


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

[Lance Albertson]

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Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:42:48 -0500 Lance Albertson
> <ramereth@gentoo.org> wrote:
> | I'm afraid those days are in the past unless some kind of fork happens
> | where the folks who think we need a leader go their way and the folks
> | who prefer the leader-by-committee approach go their way.
> 
> The two aren't mutually exclusive. A strong council can provide the
> equivalent of a single leader without the problems of what to do when
> the leader gets sick, and with less chance of a screwup because of
> increased discussion.
> 
> The problem, of course, is how to get a strong council...

I partially agree that a strong council will help the situation, but the
problem with any leadership-by-committee model is the lack of quick
decisions. Many times things come up that need a quick resolution (when
I say quick, I mean within a few days). And if you have a committee of 7
or so people that live in several different timezones, its extremely
hard to get them together to discuss it all. The council has its merits,
but it also has its weaknesses, this one being one of them. I think I
mentioned 6mo ago that we could keep the council, but select one person
to sort of be the "operational lead" to make quick decisions so that
development moves on. This type of person can try and get all the
opinions of the council members and make a decision based on that. If
they screw up, then the council can demote the person and find someone
else. Of course, this won't cover the "what if they screw up so badly
that it hurts Gentoo long term?" but that's where the level of trust
needs to be applied to your leaders. If you voted on them to be on the
council, you should trust at least one of them to make daily decisions
for the good of the council.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

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

[Dominique Michel]

I am new in this list and waiting at my mentor come back from vacations.

It is often the problem with democracy. Every one will have its word said, even if he or she know nothing about the issue. What I think is at the only mean to deal with this problem and still be democratic, is to organize the democracy.

For a subject that concern a herd, only those in the herd can vote. After voting, they send the result up in the hierarchy. The hierarchy accept it as it or do some remarks, and the process in the herd can continue, or take in account the proposition from the hierarchy with a new discussion-vote process if needed.

For a general subject, the votes must be done in the herds, and when all herbs are done with the vote, some herds representatives can discuss the issue to take a decision. The result can be at a new discussion-vote process is needed in the herds, or at it can go up. After, when it go up, it is the same as with one herd only subjects, it goes up in the hierarchy and down again.

In all cases, I think at an absolute majority is needed at all level. If it is a proposition with 3 or more possible choices, but at only one can be chooses, it is imperative at, in all level, it is at least 50% of the votes for the chooses one. By that way, herds will come with strong proposition and it is an insurance at they must stay in focus in case of disagreement.  

I think at a such democratic structure have many advantages. This list can stay on focus with development issues. The herds can focus on what they have to do at the first place. The discussion can stay on focus because it is easier to discuss in a little structure as in a big one. The democracy is preserved. All levels can say their words. The head will still be in control, and that control will be democratic.

I know at no one politician will accept such a process, but we are not doing politics. And it is just what I think.

Dominique

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 17:17:17 -0700
Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:

> I just posted this to my blog [1], but I know you don't all read it so I
> wanted to post it here as well. Do read all the way through. I very
> rarely write anything this long, and when I do, it's something I feel
> very strongly about.
> 
> I started my fourth year as a Gentoo developer in June, and Gentoo's
> changed a lot since I started back in 2003. We've become a drastically
> more democratic organization. But the question remains ___ _Is this a good
> thing?_
> 
> When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy
> years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on
> the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we
> can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on
> pretty much whatever they feel like.
> 
> When I joined, Daniel Robbins was in charge, period. Seemant Kulleen and
> Jon Portnoy were basically his lieutenants. What Daniel said was what
> happened, and woe to anyone who angered him. This generally worked out
> pretty well, but _as Gentoo grew, it didn't scale_. Everything
> significant still had to go through Daniel for personal approval.
> 
> Shortly after I finished training and became an "official" developer,
> Gentoo gained its first real structure via Gentoo Linux Enhancement
> Proposal (GLEP) 4 ___ "Gentoo top-level management structure proposal".
> The GLEP process itself was quite new then; GLEP 4 was really only the
> second proposed GLEP (the first two were details related to the GLEP
> process) and the first one that was accepted. _Its goal was to improve
> communication and coordination as well as increase accountability_.
> 
> GLEP 4 formalized a hierarchy of so-called "top-level" projects ___
> between 5 and 10 major areas into which everything in Gentoo could be
> divided. Daniel appointed the original project managers, who served
> under him.
> 
> Democratic elections entered Gentoo when we realized that we needed to
> create a new top-level project for all the desktop work, because it
> didn't fit into any existing project. Since managers already voted
> amongst themselves on GLEPs, it seemed like a natural extension for them
> to vote on a new manager. The call for nominations is archived online.
> I'd been a developer for around six months at this point, and by then I
> was the lead X maintainer. Brandon Hale was active in maintaining window
> managers and other miscellaneous applets and such. Turns out that the
> vote tied, so we became co-managers.
> 
> I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of a very
> slippery slope.
> 
> Gentoo used to be a courteous, friendly development community where
> nobody was afraid to speak his mind for fear of insult and injury. I see
> a clear correlation between the growth in democracy and the departure of
> courtesy. Once people are empowered to vote on every decision, rather
> than just having their discussion taken as input in a decision, they get
> a lot more vehement, argumentative and forceful about getting their way.
> _Flamewars and loud arguments going on for hundreds of posts have become
> commonplace, despite the occasional outcry_. Here's one such outcry, on
> March 20, 2006, to the private developers' list:
> 
>  What I've seen for the last 18 months or more is a general degeneration
>  in the attitudes of developers for their fellow developers. When I
>  joined, the attitude of people was friendly and welcoming. I screwed
>  up a couple of times. I didn't get my ass handed to me. I got picked
>  up, and comforted. And taught and tutored. ...
> 
>  So, we split from the Gentoo Technologies company, to a community owned
>  Gentoo Foundation. And now everyone was empowered. Everyone has a
>  voice. Some louder than others. The unfortunate thing is that with
>  this empowerment came a bit of assholishness. With rare exception,
>  we're pretty much all guilty of that. Someone makes a spelling error in
>  a commit, and that leads to flamefests on irc and mailing lists and
>  blog entries. And so on, ad nauseum.
> 
>  Frankly, I'm sick of it. It's burning people out. We're burning
>  ourselves out by being this way. It's time to stop this shit. To
>  everyone reading this, you've arrived at the important bit. From now,
>  please try this little thing. When you're on the mailing lists or the
>  fora or irc channels or in /query or somehow in the gentoo 'verse,
>  please try, just try, to be a little bit nicer to the people with whom
>  you're interacting. That's all. Have a little respect (even if not
>  deserved!). Listen a little. Hold back the snide comment, the
>  sarcastic remark. I don't mean to get all Oprah on you all, but I hope
>  you see my point -- just be nice for a change.
> 
> The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other
> developers being happy with any given situation.
> 
> The problem got so bad that our Developer Relations team wrote up an
> etiquette guide. Unsurprisingly, the same vocal minority that generally
> behaves like an ass and violates said etiquette guide erupted in flames
> over it, and it ended up fading into an existing but largely irrelevant
> piece of writing.
> 
> 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. 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.
> 
> All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming more
> influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about its
> members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun
> and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.
> 
> How can we do anything about this? As people such as Mike Auty have
> pointed out, the problem could be with the increasing barrage of rules,
> regulations and policies to which we're expected to adhere. Take a look
> at the FreeBSD committers' rules. Rule one is "Respect other
> committers," and rule two is "Respect other contributors." Take a look
> at the importance of courtesy and care to avoid creating long-term
> disagreements in rule one:
> 
>  Being able to work together long term is this project's greatest asset,
>  one far more important than any set of changes to the code, and turning
>  arguments about code into issues that affect our long-term ability to
>  work harmoniously together is just not worth the trade-off by any
>  conceivable stretch of the imagination. ...
> 
>  First calm down, then think about how to communicate in the most
>  effective fashion for convincing the other person(s) that your side of
>  the argument is correct, do not just blow off some steam so you can
>  feel better in the short term at the cost of a long-term flame war. Not
>  only is this very bad ___energy economics___, but repeated displays of
>  public aggression which impair our ability to work well together will
>  be dealt with severely by the project leadership and may result in
>  suspension or termination of your commit privileges.
> 
> Or how about the Ubuntu Code of Conduct? The first two rules are "Be
> considerate" and "Be respectful." Again, note that these rules are
> actually enforced. As has been pointed out on the Gentoo development
> list, you can have respect without courtesy. But Gentoo needs both! One
> just isn't good enough.
> 
> But what about Gentoo? We don't have any overriding principles like this
> from which all of the standards for behavior derive. Instead, we have a
> large document explaining specifically and in detail what's allowed and
> what isn't, and even that is ignored. Because of the bureaucracy and the
> lack of respect for devrel's role, we're effectively powerless to do
> anything when people behave in a way for which the FreeBSD project's
> leadership would kick them to the curb.
> 
> I'm not the only one to suggest that a democracy isn't the most
> productive way to run Gentoo. When people wanted to change in how Gentoo
> was run, democracy was the only option considered, rather than simply
> changing the leaders. There's an ongoing assumption that if problems
> exist, it must be somewhere in the structure rather than in the people.
> 
> If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
> from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
> would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
> to do anything about it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Donnie
> 
> P.S. -- if you want the links, you can get them from my blog post.
> 
> 1. http://spyderous.livejournal.com/80869.html
> 

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:11:52 -0500 Lance Albertson
<ramereth@gentoo.org> wrote:
| I partially agree that a strong council will help the situation, but
| the problem with any leadership-by-committee model is the lack of
| quick decisions. Many times things come up that need a quick
| resolution (when I say quick, I mean within a few days). And if you
| have a committee of 7 or so people that live in several different
| timezones, its extremely hard to get them together to discuss it all.

Mmm, afaics there's nothing preventing the council from having quick,
'as needed' informal interim meetings with whoever happens to be around.
If a few people aren't there, it's not as big a deal as if people don't
show up to the monthly meetings. Heck, the monthly meetings could be
considered a minimum...

| The council has its merits, but it also has its weaknesses, this one
| being one of them. I think I mentioned 6mo ago that we could keep the
| council, but select one person to sort of be the "operational lead"
| to make quick decisions so that development moves on.

What happens if he or she (ok, he) isn't around? Is the flexibility of
having a single "on the spot decision" leader enough to outweigh the
disadvantages over allowing mini meetings?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail            : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Lance Albertson]

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Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:11:52 -0500 Lance Albertson
> <ramereth@gentoo.org> wrote:
> | I partially agree that a strong council will help the situation, but
> | the problem with any leadership-by-committee model is the lack of
> | quick decisions. Many times things come up that need a quick
> | resolution (when I say quick, I mean within a few days). And if you
> | have a committee of 7 or so people that live in several different
> | timezones, its extremely hard to get them together to discuss it all.
> 
> Mmm, afaics there's nothing preventing the council from having quick,
> 'as needed' informal interim meetings with whoever happens to be around.
> If a few people aren't there, it's not as big a deal as if people don't
> show up to the monthly meetings. Heck, the monthly meetings could be
> considered a minimum...

True, that might work, but then you run the risk of losing cohesion of
what everyone knows. To me, the same person(s) should be at all those
meetings if possible. Its better to have one or two people who know
whats going on with all council-related stuff than one here, one there.
It can become disjointed rather easily.

> | The council has its merits, but it also has its weaknesses, this one
> | being one of them. I think I mentioned 6mo ago that we could keep the
> | council, but select one person to sort of be the "operational lead"
> | to make quick decisions so that development moves on.
> 
> What happens if he or she (ok, he) isn't around? Is the flexibility of
> having a single "on the spot decision" leader enough to outweigh the
> disadvantages over allowing mini meetings?

I thought of that while I was walking to a meeting..heh Basically,
Appoint two people to co-lead, or appoint one Lead and one Vice Lead.
That way there's some kind of accountability on the bare minimum level
and good coverage (hopefully).

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
GPG Public Key:  <http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc>
Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1  4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742

ramereth/irc.freenode.net


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

[Ferris McCormick]

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

[Luca Longinotti]

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Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:11:52 -0500 Lance Albertson
> <ramereth@gentoo.org> wrote:
> | I partially agree that a strong council will help the situation, but
> | the problem with any leadership-by-committee model is the lack of
> | quick decisions. Many times things come up that need a quick
> | resolution (when I say quick, I mean within a few days). And if you
> | have a committee of 7 or so people that live in several different
> | timezones, its extremely hard to get them together to discuss it all.
> 
> Mmm, afaics there's nothing preventing the council from having quick,
> 'as needed' informal interim meetings with whoever happens to be around.
> If a few people aren't there, it's not as big a deal as if people don't
> show up to the monthly meetings. Heck, the monthly meetings could be
> considered a minimum...

Indeed. I have to agree with Ciaran here, a stronger council seems to be
one of the best solutions. A (benevolent) dictatorship, or the opposite
of extending the democracy level even more, aren't going to solve
anything imho. The dictatorship model sure doesn't motivate volunteers,
and having more than one person is anyway better, as already pointed
out, to not have single points of failure, or potential for quick and
big damage. The opposite of a total democracy too doesn't cut it, when
anyone starts having the power to put stuff to vote, make up referendums
etc., things start to slow down and get caught up in endless bureaucracy
(I'm swiss, it happens there, often, not that it isn't a good thing for
something like a nation, but for something the size of Gentoo, and with
the scope of Gentoo, it would just hurt imho).

> | The council has its merits, but it also has its weaknesses, this one
> | being one of them. I think I mentioned 6mo ago that we could keep the
> | council, but select one person to sort of be the "operational lead"
> | to make quick decisions so that development moves on.
> 
> What happens if he or she (ok, he) isn't around? Is the flexibility of
> having a single "on the spot decision" leader enough to outweigh the
> disadvantages over allowing mini meetings?

The ability of the council to hold arbitrary mini-meetings when needed,
and eventually change the decisions at a later date (with a time limit
of course, so that people can start doing work, and at the same time
don't do too much work for it to then be eventually refused) if there is
extreme opposition (basically if you have only 2 members around, those
decides "YES", and the other 5 then tell "NO NO NO!") would seem the
best course of action to me. Having the "one council leader" doesn't cut
it, as Ciaran already mentioned for reasons of availability, and again
we'd introduce a possible "quick" point-of-failure. If there is a
decision that needs to be done extremely quick, just get together the
council members that are there and do it, although I wouldn't expect it
to be commonplace to have decisions that affect the whole of Gentoo that
need to be taken in like an hour or two, at least 1-4 days of time to
"prepare" for the decision can always be required, thus allowing the
council members to be there in a reasonable amount for those
mini-meetings, and if not, but if they know they want to say something,
there still are proxies that can act for them.
Raising the number to two co-leads can also be a solution, but what if
exactly those two are away for whatever reason, but the other 5 are
around? Now do they have to wait on one of the aforementioned two people
to do anything? That still is a possible point-of-failure, which the
other model (who is there decides, who is not does not) would solve
relatively well.

-- 
Best regards,
Luca Longinotti aka CHTEKK

LongiTEKK Networks Admin: chtekk@longitekk.com
Gentoo Dev: chtekk@gentoo.org
SysCP Dev: chtekk@syscp.org
TILUG Supporter: chtekk@tilug.ch


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

[Luis Francisco Araujo]

Lance Albertson wrote:
> 
> I thought of that while I was walking to a meeting..heh Basically,
> Appoint two people to co-lead, or appoint one Lead and one Vice Lead.
> That way there's some kind of accountability on the bare minimum level
> and good coverage (hopefully).
> 

I was also thinking about turning the Council into a Leaders Group ,
or probably to create a new Core Team.

Difference being that they would be empowered to take decisions; mainly 
technical ones.

I already can hear some of you worried with questions like "You mean, to 
have people with no clue of $<add-you-favorite-team-here> to take 
decisions about $<add-you-favorite-subject-here>?".

Well, first at all, we need to understand and moreover, accept something.

If we want to bring real and important changes to the way Gentoo works, 
we will also need to assume 'real' and important risks.

I think that we all pretty much know this, but we are scared of facing 
this reality and therefore we have incurred to just get a more passive 
body and 'try' to assume we have already addressed the issue with the 
Council (nothing against you guys, it is just that the body isn't 
designed for this).

So, now straight to the point, we could elect a Core Team , including 
people from each team. And those will be the responsible to take Gentoo 
into new 'realms' , with its 'risks' included. I am also scared about 
this model .. it might not work , it actually might create the next 
armageddon for many. But what if it does? , it might help solving this 
stagnation state Gentoo is facing right now, and bring more new ideas 
into play. i would give it a chance because my friend, it is the only 
way to solve the issue.

I personally see the Council as a very passive democratic body, which 
might be good at times; but not always. It is not definitely good for 
taking new changes and innovations into our community.

Something like that anecdote of a tribe invading an island.. after they 
landed on it, the captain ordered to burn all of the ships.. his 
soldiers asked him why? .. he said there was only two ways of ending the 
battle ... death .. or conquering the island.

This .. or let's keep running away forever.

My two Bs. cents.


PS: This was just a general idea. If you are interested about it, let's 
discuss its implementations details in a constructive way instead of 
flames about its already possible details.

-- 


Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
Gentoo Linux


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Thierry Carrez]

Lance Albertson wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:42:48 -0500 Lance Albertson
>> <ramereth@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> | I'm afraid those days are in the past unless some kind of fork happens
>> | where the folks who think we need a leader go their way and the folks
>> | who prefer the leader-by-committee approach go their way.
>>
>> The two aren't mutually exclusive. A strong council can provide the
>> equivalent of a single leader without the problems of what to do when
>> the leader gets sick, and with less chance of a screwup because of
>> increased discussion.
>>
>> The problem, of course, is how to get a strong council...
> 
> I partially agree that a strong council will help the situation, but the
> problem with any leadership-by-committee model is the lack of quick
> decisions.

Rather than complaining on how spineless the last Council and ways of
getting it stronger, it's interesting to look back at one-year-worth of
Council decisions and see where (and by whom) it has been disobeyed.

I for one was quite demotivated to see that the Infra team could
overrule the Council (and did it twice). Fixing this is the first step
in having a strong Council / leader / whatever.

-- 
Koon
Member of the last Council
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Mike Doty]

Thierry Carrez wrote:
[snip]
> I for one was quite demotivated to see that the Infra team could
> overrule the Council (and did it twice).
how?  I don't recall either instance.

--Mike

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 19:13:29 +0200 Thierry Carrez <koon@gentoo.org>
wrote:
| I for one was quite demotivated to see that the Infra team could
| overrule the Council (and did it twice). Fixing this is the first step
| in having a strong Council / leader / whatever.

Well, Infra have root and are prepared to abuse it. Perhaps that's
another thing that could be fixed...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail            : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Marius Mauch]

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On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:53:32 -0400
Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Lance Albertson wrote:
> > 
> > I thought of that while I was walking to a meeting..heh Basically,
> > Appoint two people to co-lead, or appoint one Lead and one Vice
> > Lead. That way there's some kind of accountability on the bare
> > minimum level and good coverage (hopefully).
> > 
> 
> I was also thinking about turning the Council into a Leaders Group ,
> or probably to create a new Core Team.

[snip]

Before everyone start posting "solutions" please *clearly* define the
perceived problem first, otherwise all attempts to fix it are futile.

Marius

PS: is it really already time again for the annual Gentoo restructuring
debate?

-- 
Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub

In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.

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

[Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen]

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On Thursday 24 August 2006 19:40, Mike Doty wrote:
> Thierry Carrez wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > I for one was quite demotivated to see that the Infra team could
> > overrule the Council (and did it twice).
>
> how?  I don't recall either instance.
AFAIR one thing was staff email adresses (sub domain or not) the other I don't 
remember off hand.

-- 
Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen
Gentoo Linux Security Team

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

[Lance Albertson]

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Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen wrote:
> On Thursday 24 August 2006 19:40, Mike Doty wrote:
>> Thierry Carrez wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>>> I for one was quite demotivated to see that the Infra team could
>>> overrule the Council (and did it twice).
>> how?  I don't recall either instance.
> AFAIR one thing was staff email adresses (sub domain or not) the other I don't 
> remember off hand.
> 

For the record, I was waiting for those folks to come to us to resolve
it. Last I knew we had a partial resolution with the parties involved,
but shortly after that they just stopped pursing it. I figured if it was
that important to them, they'd get back with us. So I'm not sure what
happened to that exactly. If they weren't pursing it anymore, I didn't
see the point in us pursing it since they were the ones requesting it.

Anyways, I'm not going to take any more flame bait since I'm sick and
tired of this shit.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
GPG Public Key:  <http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc>
Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1  4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742

ramereth/irc.freenode.net


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

[Luis Francisco Araujo]

Marius Mauch wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:53:32 -0400
> Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
>> Lance Albertson wrote:
>>> I thought of that while I was walking to a meeting..heh Basically,
>>> Appoint two people to co-lead, or appoint one Lead and one Vice
>>> Lead. That way there's some kind of accountability on the bare
>>> minimum level and good coverage (hopefully).
>>>
>> I was also thinking about turning the Council into a Leaders Group ,
>> or probably to create a new Core Team.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Before everyone start posting "solutions" please *clearly* define the
> perceived problem first, otherwise all attempts to fix it are futile.
> 

Gentoo current state of stagnation.
(re-read some posting of this thread, the first one made by Donnie mainly)

> PS: is it really already time again for the annual Gentoo restructuring
> debate?
> 

That's what happens when you 'try' to evade the real problems. They will 
get back, stronger than ever every time.

-- 


Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
Gentoo Linux


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 13:14:10 -0500 Lance Albertson
<ramereth@gentoo.org> wrote:
| Anyways, I'm not going to take any more flame bait since I'm sick and
| tired of this shit.

I'm glad to see that you're serious about addressing what other people
perceive to be issues with the current structure, and aren't just
moaning that things aren't the way *you* want them to be.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail            : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Alec Warner]

Mike Doty wrote:
> Thierry Carrez wrote:
> [snip]
> 
>> I for one was quite demotivated to see that the Infra team could
>> overrule the Council (and did it twice).
> 
> how?  I don't recall either instance.
> 
> --Mike
> 

I believe the latter was the revoking of Ciaran's CVS access prior to 
his trial.
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Homer Parker]

On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 13:14 -0500, Lance Albertson wrote:
> For the record, I was waiting for those folks to come to us to resolve
> it. Last I knew we had a partial resolution with the parties involved,
> but shortly after that they just stopped pursing it. I figured if it
> was
> that important to them, they'd get back with us. So I'm not sure what
> happened to that exactly. If they weren't pursing it anymore, I didn't
> see the point in us pursing it since they were the ones requesting
> it. 

	It is important, and still on my todo list. I'm still awaiting the
anon-cvs/svn/whatever to be finished before taking on the next part. Not
trying to reopen the whole can of worms at them moment, but.. As for
partial resolution, the discussion degenerated to having those saying it
would cause classes of devs vs those saying they aren't devs and
shouldn't have @g.o addresses from what I remember. I'll have to go
re-read the thread to be sure.

-- 
Homer Parker <hparker@gentoo.org>

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Daniel Ostrow]

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On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 20:55 +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Lance Albertson wrote:
> 
> > Anyways, I'm not going to take any more flame bait since I'm sick and
> > tired of this shit.
> 
> And my intention was not to revive that precise debate. I'm just saying
> that for the "leader" (or "strong council") to succeed, everyone has to
> follow what he/they decide.
> 
> With the current organization/devsgroup, very often the affected team
> will think that the decision is not right or could be improved (and very
> often they will be right, as they know better their turf than anyone).
> Is *everyone* here prepared to obey to orders they won't like ?
> 
> That's why I agree with you Lance when you say :
> 
> > I'm afraid those days are in the past unless some kind of fork happens
> > where the folks who think we need a leader go their way and the folks
> > who prefer the leader-by-committee approach go their way. We all hate
> > forks, none of us have time for forks, but looking at the dividing line,
> > I don't see how we'll be able to compromise with out adding more
> > policies and BS.
> 
> I've done my best the last two years trying to change the metastructure
> into something more efficient. I guess I failed. A lot of current devs
> did not enter Gentoo by signing a "I will obey to the leader" paper, so
> they decided noone can rule (or change the system). I see only a fork to
> solve the division between those wanting strong leadership/vision and
> those wanting gentoo-dev votes for every decision (yes, someone asked
> for that not that long ago).

The way I look at it is having strong leadership does not mean
abdicating your ability to provide quality input in the leadership
process. The entire reason for the two aforementioned issues boiled down
to a lack of communication. I believe that the job of a good leader is
to seek out feedback from those that know better about an issue then
they do. Being a good leader *means* understanding your strengths and
weaknesses.

Taking the email issue previously mentioned as an example. The council
was under the impression that since the discussions happened out in the
open that any issues anyone had would have been raised in that forum,
infra was under the impression that if they were going to be asked to
perform a new duty that their opinions would have been actively
solicited (and I'm talking more then "Well the meeting agenda was posted
and no one from infra showed up ... I guess infra doesn't care.", what I
am talking about is "Well this involves infra in a key way, lets get
Lance and Kurt in here to discuss this and if we can't find them lets
postpone the discussion until we can."), neither happened and what we
ended up with was an edict that made no sense. Clearly, although filling
this role is less then glamorous, the roll of those in charge has to
include actively tracking the involved parties down, quiet acquiescence
and silent acceptance can't work when dealing with issues that involve
the hard work of other people.

When I talk about strong leaders who provide a forward looking vision I
am not talking about people who do this in a vacuum, I am talking about
people who coalesce the will of the group into a cohesive plan and
provide way points along the way to ensure that progress is being made.
I am talking about people who build their own vision on top of the ideas
of the other groups that make up the community. Sure even in those cases
there will be conflicting goals and differing opinions but those in
charge should be able to hear those out and try to come to a rational
compromise. From there the decision has to stand...I have a feeling that
following a plan, even when it doesn't jive with your view, will be an
easier pill to swallow if you are sure that your input and concerns were
honestly heard and digested as part of the decision making process. I
think of the community as a whole as a sort of advisory board to the
Council...I dunno, I'm sure there will still be those that are so upset
that their choice, opinion, or plan was not heeded 100% that they throw
a fit and/or leave but maybe just maybe that is OK, maybe that is just a
sign that was they want isn't what Gentoo is. We are trying to make
Gentoo everything for everyone and failing...maybe we just need to
accept that we are not and cannot be and that people moving on to find
what really is what they want is healthy, not only for Gentoo but for
Linux and OSS as whole.

--Dan

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

[Lance Albertson]

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Homer Parker wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 13:14 -0500, Lance Albertson wrote:
>> For the record, I was waiting for those folks to come to us to resolve
>> it. Last I knew we had a partial resolution with the parties involved,
>> but shortly after that they just stopped pursing it. I figured if it
>> was
>> that important to them, they'd get back with us. So I'm not sure what
>> happened to that exactly. If they weren't pursing it anymore, I didn't
>> see the point in us pursing it since they were the ones requesting
>> it. 
> 
> 	It is important, and still on my todo list. I'm still awaiting the
> anon-cvs/svn/whatever to be finished before taking on the next part. Not
> trying to reopen the whole can of worms at them moment, but.. As for
> partial resolution, the discussion degenerated to having those saying it
> would cause classes of devs vs those saying they aren't devs and
> shouldn't have @g.o addresses from what I remember. I'll have to go
> re-read the thread to be sure.
> 

Yeah, I don't remember where we left off either. I'd have to re-read
myself to catch up. I just recall us coming close to a solution.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
GPG Public Key:  <http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc>
Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1  4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742

ramereth/irc.freenode.net


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

[Lance Albertson]

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Alec Warner wrote:
> Mike Doty wrote:
>> Thierry Carrez wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>>> I for one was quite demotivated to see that the Infra team could
>>> overrule the Council (and did it twice).
>>
>> how?  I don't recall either instance.
>>
>> --Mike
>>
> 
> I believe the latter was the revoking of Ciaran's CVS access prior to
> his trial.

Yup, which we've apologized for since then and acknowledged as a mistake
on our part. We also established better communication between all the
groups involved so that it doesn't happen again. So aside from the
perceived outcome, we did fix a few issues that we had with that.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
GPG Public Key:  <http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc>
Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1  4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742

ramereth/irc.freenode.net


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

[Marius Mauch]

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On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:15:18 -0400
Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Marius Mauch wrote:
> > On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:53:32 -0400
> > Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> Lance Albertson wrote:
> >>> I thought of that while I was walking to a meeting..heh Basically,
> >>> Appoint two people to co-lead, or appoint one Lead and one Vice
> >>> Lead. That way there's some kind of accountability on the bare
> >>> minimum level and good coverage (hopefully).
> >>>
> >> I was also thinking about turning the Council into a Leaders
> >> Group , or probably to create a new Core Team.
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> > Before everyone start posting "solutions" please *clearly* define
> > the perceived problem first, otherwise all attempts to fix it are
> > futile.
> > 
> 
> Gentoo current state of stagnation.
> (re-read some posting of this thread, the first one made by Donnie
> mainly)

That's about as vague as you can get.

Marius

-- 
Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub

In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.

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

[Donnie Berkholz]

Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen wrote:
> On Thursday 24 August 2006 09:52, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen wrote:
>> What? This doesn't make any sense. People bitching and moaning and
>> screaming all over -dev until no one else has any interest in pursuing
>> anything has nothing to do with who I vote for.
> No but in a democracy people who did "a splendid job of becoming more
>  influential" usually did it through votes somehow. If you just mean that it 
> discourage others from doing anything, you're right about that.
> 
>> This has nothing to do with the foundation, it manages our intellectual
>> property and finances.
> So you would keep "democracy" for the foundation?

It's a very different organization, so a different sort of management is 
appropriate. The foundation doesn't need to manage hundreds of 
developers. There's just a single board, copyrights, trademarks, and money.

Thanks,
Donnie
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Luis Francisco Araujo]

Marius Mauch wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:15:18 -0400
> Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
>> Marius Mauch wrote:
>>> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:53:32 -0400
>>> Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Lance Albertson wrote:
>>>>> I thought of that while I was walking to a meeting..heh Basically,
>>>>> Appoint two people to co-lead, or appoint one Lead and one Vice
>>>>> Lead. That way there's some kind of accountability on the bare
>>>>> minimum level and good coverage (hopefully).
>>>>>
>>>> I was also thinking about turning the Council into a Leaders
>>>> Group , or probably to create a new Core Team.
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>> Before everyone start posting "solutions" please *clearly* define
>>> the perceived problem first, otherwise all attempts to fix it are
>>> futile.
>>>
>> Gentoo current state of stagnation.
>> (re-read some posting of this thread, the first one made by Donnie
>> mainly)
> 
> That's about as vague as you can get.
> 
> Marius
> 

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gentoo-dev&m=115637880223243&w=2


*sighs*

-- 


Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
Gentoo Linux


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Donnie Berkholz]

Stuart Herbert wrote:
> On 8/24/06, Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy
>> years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on
>> the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we
>> can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on
>> pretty much whatever they feel like.
> 
> We've had a global vision for where Gentoo is going from before I
> joined - Gentoo is here to create a source-based distribution where
> each package is as close to what $UPSTREAM intended it to be as
> possible.  We're not trying to take $UPSTREAM packages and innovate
> with them - we're here to do a first class job of packaging them up.

A distribution is more than just an entity that packages upstream 
tarballs. I agree with your point, but it misses a large chunk of what 
we do.

If this is the Gentoo vision, then why are we even doing anything else? 
We've already reached our only goal, which is packaging stuff, and all 
we need to do is bump it.

People need to feel that Gentoo is _moving forward_, that it's actually 
going somewhere.

> Scaling wasn't the only issue.  There were too many topics -
> especially when it came to servers and web-related issues - that were
> just beyond Daniel's experience and understanding.  You also left Kurt
> out as one of the lieutenants.

OK, sure, add Kurt to the list for the record. But that's not really 
part of my point.

> That hierarchy was always flawed.  Server-related matters never had a
> seat at the top table, and ended up being represented by the base
> systems manager.  That actually turned out quite well for us, because
> folks simply left us alone to get on with things.

Then why wasn't the hierarchy fixed? Instead we somehow ended up in this 
huge metastructure debate and changed everything around.

>> Democratic elections entered Gentoo when we realized that we needed to
>> create a new top-level project for all the desktop work, because it
>> didn't fit into any existing project. Since managers already voted
>> amongst themselves on GLEPs, it seemed like a natural extension for them
>> to vote on a new manager. The call for nominations is archived online.
>> I'd been a developer for around six months at this point, and by then I
>> was the lead X maintainer. Brandon Hale was active in maintaining window
>> managers and other miscellaneous applets and such. Turns out that the
>> vote tied, so we became co-managers.
>>
>> I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of a very
>> slippery slope.
>>
>> Gentoo used to be a courteous, friendly development community where
>> nobody was afraid to speak his mind for fear of insult and injury. I see
>> a clear correlation between the growth in democracy and the departure of
>> courtesy. Once people are empowered to vote on every decision, rather
>> than just having their discussion taken as input in a decision, they get
>> a lot more vehement, argumentative and forceful about getting their way.
>> _Flamewars and loud arguments going on for hundreds of posts have become
>> commonplace, despite the occasional outcry_.
> 
> Except ... even today, folks simply aren't empowered to vote on every
> decision (other than by voting with their feet).  Your hypothesis
> seems to be based on a flawed model of how Gentoo works, I'm afraid.

"Official" votes, sure. But what about GLEP discussions on -dev? That's 
the only way anything major ever happens, and it might as well be a 
requirement for a unanimous vote among all ~350 developers. The only 
time I can recall even a single dissenter before a GLEP moved on to the 
council was brix on Sunrise.

>> The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other
>> developers being happy with any given situation.
> 
> This is hardly a new phenomenon invented by Gentoo.  You'll find
> tonnes about this under topics such as "growing pains", and also
> "management by ego".
> 
> The basic cause always comes down to weak or non-existent management.

Yes, and that's exactly my point. We need stronger management.

>> 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.

That in itself is proof enough. There were numerous instances where it 
_should_ have been tested but wasn't, because of all the hassle required 
to do anything.

>> All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming more
>> influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about its
>> members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun
>> and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.
> 
> Can you back this up with three examples in the last twelve months
> where this has happened?

Any long debate where more than 25% of the posts came from a single person.

> Our problem is that we have a critical mass of groups who do not share
> a culture to bind them together, and drive them to overcome their
> differences.

I'll agree with that.

>> But what about Gentoo? We don't have any overriding principles like this
>> from which all of the standards for behavior derive. Instead, we have a
>> large document explaining specifically and in detail what's allowed and
>> what isn't, and even that is ignored. Because of the bureaucracy and the
>> lack of respect for devrel's role, we're effectively powerless to do
>> anything when people behave in a way for which the FreeBSD project's
>> leadership would kick them to the curb.
> 
> Hrm.  Where is this lack of respect for devrel being displayed today?
> What forms does this lack of respect take?  If there's a lack of
> respect at the moment, it's not for devrel.

How about in Gentoo's complete inability to do anything about the 
constant trolling and people acting like assholes? We say we're about 
courtesy but we don't (can't?) do a damn thing about it, because it 
requires a huge, convoluted investigation and trial and nobody's willing 
to waste that much time.

I know this is partially changing, but I'm unsure that any group outside 
of the council will ever be trusted to suspend or kick people out.

> A good way to sort that out is to get them together in the physical
> world, and use group de-polarisation exercises to help folks
> understand that their view of the world isn't the only view that is
> valid.  This is why I'm hoping to see Gentoo establish a regular
> international dev conference.  You'll find that the vast majority of
> issues won't arise once folks actually know each other better - and
> the personality clashes that are left are easier to see for what they
> are.

Some Debian developers commented on my blog about how valuable DebConf 
was for this.

> I'd also argue that we're _not_ powerless.  It wasn't pleasant, but
> the old system has shown that we can deal with genuine trouble makers.

Barely, and with enormous effort ...

>> I'm not the only one to suggest that a democracy isn't the most
>> productive way to run Gentoo. When people wanted to change in how Gentoo
>> was run, democracy was the only option considered, rather than simply
>> changing the leaders. There's an ongoing assumption that if problems
>> exist, it must be somewhere in the structure rather than in the people.
> 
> We don't have a democracy.  Gentoo is largely a workocracy (there must
> be a better word for it ;), where the vast majority decisions are made
> by the folks who actually do the work.

Only the small-scale decisions.

> Folks don't vote on stuff.  To pick a recent example, none of the
> folks who opposed Sunrise actually had any means to vote to prevent it
> happening.  What they had to do was to lobby the council, who were the
> only folks with a vote.

Oh, gimme a break. Screaming about it on -dev for hundreds of posts 
isn't just equivalent to a vote, it's better. It makes people think 
there's more than 2 developers opposed to it.

> If we had actually tried a democracy (something I'm instinctively
> against, but rationally am becoming more and more interested in), your
> arguments would maybe carry some weight.  But, the clear fact of the
> matter is that we haven't - and that leaves your arguments built on
> sand.

Untrue, voices make a democracy.

> I'm naturally suspicious of anyone who seeks office on a platform of
> talking about the need to beef up the powers of an unelected body (ie
> devrel)

I'd rather get rid of devrel altogether (at least its conflict 
resolution role) and have the council deal with this.

You say "unelected" like it's evil. In a company, nobody gets elected, 
but a hell of a lot of work happens.

> You've just lost my vote.

What vote? I'm not running for anything, and I have no desire to do so. 
I'm just trying to get people interested in fixing Gentoo so it's not 
stuck in the mud.

> I'm not standing for election, but maybe someone who is would be
> interested in investigating some ideas Sejo discussed with me when he
> left us.  The summary is my own; hopefully I've captured Sejo's ideas
> accurately.
> 
> *  Every staff member has to belong to a team.  You join a team by
> being voted onto the team by the other members of the team.  They
> don't vote you in, you can't join.
> *  If you're not part of any team, your rights and privileges as a
> staff member are automatically terminated.  There's no place to go to
> appeal.
> *  You can be voted off the team at any time.  The teams are self-managing.

The goal?

Thanks,
Donnie
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Michael Cummings]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Stuart Herbert wrote:
 > We've had a global vision for where Gentoo is going from before I
> joined - Gentoo is here to create a source-based distribution where
> each package is as close to what $UPSTREAM intended it to be as
> possible.  We're not trying to take $UPSTREAM packages and innovate
> with them - we're here to do a first class job of packaging them up.

Um, that's a mission statement, not a vision. A vision is a series of
goals for a project, like "my vision is that we will produce knoppix
like catalyst+template releases for myth, firewalls-on-a-disk, etc by
the 2007.0 release."  a mission statement is "we'll make the best from
source distro ever." i.e, mission statements never change because they
are just an overarching definition of a project, not the vision or goal
it might be working towards at the moment.

somebody shoot me, my job in middle management is finally getting to me.

- --

- -----o()o----------------------------------------------
Michael Cummings   |    #gentoo-dev, #gentoo-perl
Gentoo Perl Dev    |    on irc.freenode.net
Gentoo/SPARC
Gentoo/AMD64
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Democracy: No silver bullet

[Daniel Ostrow]

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On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 17:26 -0400, Michael Cummings wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Stuart Herbert wrote:
>  > We've had a global vision for where Gentoo is going from before I
> > joined - Gentoo is here to create a source-based distribution where
> > each package is as close to what $UPSTREAM intended it to be as
> > possible.  We're not trying to take $UPSTREAM packages and innovate
> > with them - we're here to do a first class job of packaging them up.
> 
> Um, that's a mission statement, not a vision. A vision is a series of
> goals for a project, like "my vision is that we will produce knoppix
> like catalyst+template releases for myth, firewalls-on-a-disk, etc by
> the 2007.0 release."  a mission statement is "we'll make the best from
> source distro ever." i.e, mission statements never change because they
> are just an overarching definition of a project, not the vision or goal
> it might be working towards at the moment.
> 
> somebody shoot me, my job in middle management is finally getting to me.

Exactly...

Above and beyond that is the next step...once you have a vision...ok so
what do we need to do to further the vision, do we need more devs doing
X, do we need hardware Y, do we need an Ice Cream machine...

Leadership is way more then just shouting a vision out to the world and
expecting people to hop to it...its about helping facilitate that
visions completion, keeping yourself involved so those working on it
feel involved themselves...leadership is just as much a community
building exercise as any of the rest of it.

--Dan

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

[Marius Mauch]

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On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:46:12 -0400
Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Marius Mauch wrote:
> > On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:15:18 -0400
> > Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> Marius Mauch wrote:
> >>> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:53:32 -0400
> >>> Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Lance Albertson wrote:
> >>>>> I thought of that while I was walking to a meeting..heh
> >>>>> Basically, Appoint two people to co-lead, or appoint one Lead
> >>>>> and one Vice Lead. That way there's some kind of accountability
> >>>>> on the bare minimum level and good coverage (hopefully).
> >>>>>
> >>>> I was also thinking about turning the Council into a Leaders
> >>>> Group , or probably to create a new Core Team.
> >>> [snip]
> >>>
> >>> Before everyone start posting "solutions" please *clearly* define
> >>> the perceived problem first, otherwise all attempts to fix it are
> >>> futile.
> >>>
> >> Gentoo current state of stagnation.
> >> (re-read some posting of this thread, the first one made by Donnie
> >> mainly)
> > 
> > That's about as vague as you can get.
> > 
> > Marius
> > 
> 
> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gentoo-dev&m=115637880223243&w=2
> 
> 
> *sighs*

Donnie isn't much clearer either (it's mostly observations mixed with
personal feelings, not much in real problem anlysis). 
Why do you think Gentoo is stagnating?
What are the exact problems?
List them one by one with one or two sentences, give concrete
examples/pointers of what went wrong in the past. Statements like
"nothing got done in Gentoo" are useless when you don't say what you
think should have been done (without using "something").

In my opinion this really isn't much different than fixing a bug in
a program (conceptually):
1) Describe the problem by listing actual and expected results.
2) Locate the (physical) source of the problem.
3) Analyze what's really causing the problem, verify that your analysis
is correct.
4) Determine what the best option to fix the problem

Right now we're just at the beginning of 1), we have a high level
description of the problem, now we need to split it up into testcases
(= actual examples of what people think went wrong).
Only then can you proceed with the next step.

Maybe it's just because I don't really see a problem myself, but I'd
really like to understand what people want to get improved, but for
that we have to move the discussion to a lower (technical) level. Or do
you consider bug reports useful where the problem description is "it
doesn't work"?

I mean we had a structure when Daniel left, we considered it to be
broken and replaced it with something else (after a long debate,
selected from multiple proposals), and now everyone says this is also
broken and again wants to turn everything upside? If so then lets first
please examine why.

Marius

PS: I'm not tied to any specific structure, just dislike the constant
"something sucks, lets change something in the organization to fix it"
attitude without ever really knowing what this "something" exactly is.

-- 
Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub

In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.

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

[Donnie Berkholz]

Marius Mauch wrote:
> Donnie isn't much clearer either (it's mostly observations mixed with
> personal feelings, not much in real problem anlysis). 

Yeah, later I'll probably boil that down into something more bullet-pointy.

Thanks,
Donnie
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 14:54 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> It's very easy to claim that "there are too many flamewars", even if
> that isn't actually true. It's hard to claim "Portage needs replacing,
> the tree has huge QA issues, several archs are horribly unmaintained and
> too many developers don't have a clue what they're doing" because a)
> they're difficult problems to address, b) if you do say them, Condorcet
> ensures that you won't get elected and c) you might be expected to fix
> them.

Well, I've held of on replying to this thread for a bit, mostly due to
lack of time since taking a week off for LWE, but also because I really
wanted to formulate what I wanted to say properly.  Forgive me, but your
post just seemed like a good place to comment.

As far as the "claims" that you posted, I definitely agree with all of
them except the "portage needs replacing" one, and that is mostly due to
my lack of knowledge of the internals of portage.  I simply don't think
I know enough about it to speak with any authority.

I *am* running for the council this time around.  Quite frankly, I would
love to work on fixing these problems, and I know that many of the
people running for the council do, too.

> Most of these problems could be solved if we had a council that was far
> less spineless, a council that's prepared to address the *real* issues
> rather than doing nothing, a council that shows leadership and provides
> direction where it's needed without screwing things up where it's not.

I definitely agree here.  What has made me decide to run for the council
is my wish to see things improve before we honestly do start
hemorrhaging developers.  We have seen indications that it is coming,
but it hasn't started quite yet.  A strong leadership is needed to give
us direction where needed, and also to leave people well enough alone
where it is not needed.  I hope that all of the people elected to the
council are capable of doing both, as it really is what Gentoo seems to
need.

I also would much rather see us return to a system where the merit of
ones work plays a more important role in the voice one has on global
issues.  Perhaps the idea of "one man, one vote" simply doesn't work
well amongst a large group of volunteers with vastly differing levels of
involvement.  Perhaps more voting is the answer.  Truthfully, I do not
know.  However, I lean on the side of a strong set of leaders having the
authority to make decisions, with limited voting only to establish the
leaders.  After all, if they're voted into office by the majority, then
the majority must want them to represent them, right?

> The problem with the old system was devrel's habit of holding secret
> meetings, Daniel's habit of going off and deciding new directions
> (catalyst, genkernel, ...) without consulting those who understood the
> issues involved and so on. The problem with the new system is that it
> encourages fence sitting and stagnation, and draws focus away from the
> real issues and onto populist mud flinging.

Quite frankly, I think that with a properly run community, there should
be no need for a "Developer Relations" project, since it should be
mostly self-policing.  Beyond that, the leadership should have the power
and the ability to take care of problems in a timely manner without the
need for droves of bureaucratic process.  I'm sure nearly every member
of devrel would agree that they would love to see a Gentoo where devrel
simply wasn't needed.

What I see with the upcoming newly-elected council is a chance to learn
from the past year and rectify our downfalls and mistakes.  Let's all
just hope that this is what happens, rather than compounding the problem
further.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 14:00 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> A distribution is more than just an entity that packages upstream 
> tarballs. I agree with your point, but it misses a large chunk of what 
> we do.

We also have releases.

Another thing that we do is fix bugs, even in upstream packages, and
submit them to the upstream.  In this regard, we are a valuable member
of the community as a whole.  How many patches have come out of Gentoo
to fix bugs/vulnerabilities?

> If this is the Gentoo vision, then why are we even doing anything else? 
> We've already reached our only goal, which is packaging stuff, and all 
> we need to do is bump it.

I surely hope this isn't the vision, or I've been wasting an awful lot
of time.

> > Except ... even today, folks simply aren't empowered to vote on every
> > decision (other than by voting with their feet).  Your hypothesis
> > seems to be based on a flawed model of how Gentoo works, I'm afraid.
> 
> "Official" votes, sure. But what about GLEP discussions on -dev? That's 
> the only way anything major ever happens, and it might as well be a 
> requirement for a unanimous vote among all ~350 developers. The only 
> time I can recall even a single dissenter before a GLEP moved on to the 
> council was brix on Sunrise.

I was there, too.  Of course, I also prove some of your points.  I got
tired of giving the same arguments ad nauseum.  I eventually gave up
fighting it to move on to other things.  I will admit that many of my
concerns were resolved.

> > The basic cause always comes down to weak or non-existent management.
> 
> Yes, and that's exactly my point. We need stronger management.

Indeed.

> >> All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming more
> >> influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about its
> >> members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun
> >> and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.
> > 
> > Can you back this up with three examples in the last twelve months
> > where this has happened?

Sunrise (twice)
Pretty much anything dealing with portage features (or lack thereof)

> Any long debate where more than 25% of the posts came from a single person.

I know that I've been a participant in at least one of these.  I've also
noticed it an started to "dial back" my responses to try to stay more
on-topic and technical.  Having a nice release helps to curb the free
time for replying to emails, too.  ;]

> > Our problem is that we have a critical mass of groups who do not share
> > a culture to bind them together, and drive them to overcome their
> > differences.
> 
> I'll agree with that.

As would I.

> I know this is partially changing, but I'm unsure that any group outside 
> of the council will ever be trusted to suspend or kick people out.

I agree with this pretty strongly, if only because the council is an
elected group.

> > Folks don't vote on stuff.  To pick a recent example, none of the
> > folks who opposed Sunrise actually had any means to vote to prevent it
> > happening.  What they had to do was to lobby the council, who were the
> > only folks with a vote.
> 
> Oh, gimme a break. Screaming about it on -dev for hundreds of posts 
> isn't just equivalent to a vote, it's better. It makes people think 
> there's more than 2 developers opposed to it.

Really?  Even you didn't remember that *I* was opposed to Sunrise and
probably accounted for at least a good 50 responses.  Yes, good came
from it.  Yes, it could have been done much, much better.

> I'd rather get rid of devrel altogether (at least its conflict 
> resolution role) and have the council deal with this.

Agreed.

> > I'm not standing for election, but maybe someone who is would be
> > interested in investigating some ideas Sejo discussed with me when he
> > left us.  The summary is my own; hopefully I've captured Sejo's ideas
> > accurately.
> > 
> > *  Every staff member has to belong to a team.  You join a team by
> > being voted onto the team by the other members of the team.  They
> > don't vote you in, you can't join.

I don't think his ideas included anything explicit.  Only more that the
team (or even just the lead) could give a thumbs down to you joining.

> > *  If you're not part of any team, your rights and privileges as a
> > staff member are automatically terminated.  There's no place to go to
> > appeal.

I think the intention was for the council to be the appellate body.

> > *  You can be voted off the team at any time.  The teams are self-managing.

I'm sure a vote wasn't necessary.

> The goal?

Hopefully, to streamline processes and give power back to individual
projects to govern themselves in internal matters and let people get
back to doing development.  That's a goal I would love to see us strive
to achieve in the next year.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 14:00 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> Oh, gimme a break. Screaming about it on -dev for hundreds of posts 
>> isn't just equivalent to a vote, it's better. It makes people think 
>> there's more than 2 developers opposed to it.
> 
> Really?  Even you didn't remember that *I* was opposed to Sunrise and
> probably accounted for at least a good 50 responses.  Yes, good came
> from it.  Yes, it could have been done much, much better.

Sunrise is a poor example for me, because I ignored all the discussion
on it past a certain point. It was just rehashing the same points over,
and over, and over...

> Hopefully, to streamline processes and give power back to individual
> projects to govern themselves in internal matters and let people get
> back to doing development.  That's a goal I would love to see us strive
> to achieve in the next year.

From what I see, projects are pretty free to govern themselves. How do
you see it differently?

As Weeve said, he's still trying to get people to stop breaking SPARC
keywords, just like 3 years ago. It's just when trying to do anything
larger than a single project that you run into issues.

Thanks,
Donnie


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

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 14:54 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>> Most of these problems could be solved if we had a council that was far
>> less spineless, a council that's prepared to address the *real* issues
>> rather than doing nothing, a council that shows leadership and provides
>> direction where it's needed without screwing things up where it's not.
> 
> I definitely agree here.  What has made me decide to run for the council
> is my wish to see things improve before we honestly do start
> hemorrhaging developers.  We have seen indications that it is coming,
> but it hasn't started quite yet.  A strong leadership is needed to give
> us direction where needed, and also to leave people well enough alone
> where it is not needed.  I hope that all of the people elected to the
> council are capable of doing both, as it really is what Gentoo seems to
> need.
> 
> I also would much rather see us return to a system where the merit of
> ones work plays a more important role in the voice one has on global
> issues.  Perhaps the idea of "one man, one vote" simply doesn't work
> well amongst a large group of volunteers with vastly differing levels of
> involvement.  Perhaps more voting is the answer.  Truthfully, I do not
> know.  However, I lean on the side of a strong set of leaders having the
> authority to make decisions, with limited voting only to establish the
> leaders.  After all, if they're voted into office by the majority, then
> the majority must want them to represent them, right?

Yes, yes, yes!

Thanks,
Donnie


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

[Andrew Cowie]

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On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 22:36 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> As Weeve said, he's still trying to get people to stop breaking SPARC
> keywords, just like 3 years ago. It's just when trying to do anything
> larger than a single project that you run into issues.

As an aside, this has long been the fundamental structural problem in
the open source movement. Within a given project, things generally find
a way to get done, but when a problem lies between two projects (be they
peers, one dependant on the other, whatever) then things often remain
unresolved.

Examples:

      * Desktop integration between GNOME and KDE and graphics
        performance & capability improvement; freedesktop.org was the
        result of efforts to try and bridge / fill in these gaps.

      * Apache and PHP arguing over who was to blame for a certain
        incompatibility over Apache2 causing crashes. httpd people said
        it was PHP's fault; PHP said it was Apache's problem. And this a
        case where Rasmus is a lead committer on both projects!

This is actually the cutting edge area in the free software movement at
the moment - trying to find a common ground for not just projects but
constellations of projects and above them distros to collaborate. 

[This is what Mark Shuttleworth claims as his focus and it is the
titular role of launchpad to facilitate along these lines; remains to be
seen whether any other distros or large projects will actually start
using it. Viz also the mad activity in third-generation
distributed-version-control-system land]

AfC
Sydney


-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Managing Director
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/
Management Consultants specializing in strategy,
organizational architecture, procedures to survive
change, and performance hardening for the people
and systems behind the mission critical enterprise.

Worldwide:

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

[Mike Bonar]

Daniel Ostrow wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 17:26 -0400, Michael Cummings wrote:
>   
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> Stuart Herbert wrote:
>>  > We've had a global vision for where Gentoo is going from before I
>>     
>>> joined - Gentoo is here to create a source-based distribution where
>>> each package is as close to what $UPSTREAM intended it to be as
>>> possible.  We're not trying to take $UPSTREAM packages and innovate
>>> with them - we're here to do a first class job of packaging them up.
>>>       
>> Um, that's a mission statement, not a vision. A vision is a series of
>> goals for a project, like "my vision is that we will produce knoppix
>> like catalyst+template releases for myth, firewalls-on-a-disk, etc by
>> the 2007.0 release."  a mission statement is "we'll make the best from
>> source distro ever." i.e, mission statements never change because they
>> are just an overarching definition of a project, not the vision or goal
>> it might be working towards at the moment.
>>
>> somebody shoot me, my job in middle management is finally getting to me.
>>     
>
> Exactly...
>
> Above and beyond that is the next step...once you have a vision...ok so
> what do we need to do to further the vision, do we need more devs doing
> X, do we need hardware Y, do we need an Ice Cream machine...
>
> Leadership is way more then just shouting a vision out to the world and
> expecting people to hop to it...its about helping facilitate that
> visions completion, keeping yourself involved so those working on it
> feel involved themselves...leadership is just as much a community
> building exercise as any of the rest of it.
>
> --Dan
>   
Vision says who we are and why we are here.  It speaks to our shared 
values and what makes us a community.  Once you have a vision, you need 
Strategy.  A Strategy describes the big plays you are going to make to 
achieve your vision.  Examples might be, "We want to be the biggest 
distro, or We want to be the most user friendly distro, or We want to 
capture the enterprise market for Linux, etc.  Once you have your 
Strategy, you need a plan and the plan must match the Strategy.  Once 
you have a plan, you execute.  That's what leadership does.

My 2 cents.

Mike
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 22:36 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 14:00 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> >> Oh, gimme a break. Screaming about it on -dev for hundreds of posts 
> >> isn't just equivalent to a vote, it's better. It makes people think 
> >> there's more than 2 developers opposed to it.
> > 
> > Really?  Even you didn't remember that *I* was opposed to Sunrise and
> > probably accounted for at least a good 50 responses.  Yes, good came
> > from it.  Yes, it could have been done much, much better.
> 
> Sunrise is a poor example for me, because I ignored all the discussion
> on it past a certain point. It was just rehashing the same points over,
> and over, and over...

Yes, because we were asked for the same thing over and over, which is
also why I ended up no longer responding.  You can only say the same
thing so many ways before it gets tiring.

> > Hopefully, to streamline processes and give power back to individual
> > projects to govern themselves in internal matters and let people get
> > back to doing development.  That's a goal I would love to see us strive
> > to achieve in the next year.
> 
> From what I see, projects are pretty free to govern themselves. How do
> you see it differently?

How do you kick someone out of a project?  Currently, I know of no way
to do so.

What process is required for someone to join a project?  Currently,
anyone can add themselves to any project without any consent from the
project itself.  The only real counter-examples to this are projects
which require some kind of specific authorization to join, such as
devrel or infra, since they have access controls.

Who is responsible for an individual developer's work, aside from the
developer?  If a developer joins a project and doesn't do what he's
promised, nothing happens to him.  If he doesn't work his bugs, nothing
happens.  Why not?

What if the developer does poor work?  This really ties into the above,
but what happens if someone is found to not really possess the skills
necessary to be in a project?  Right now, we cannot do anything about
this person but hope that they either magically gain the skills, or
leave the project on their own accord.

> As Weeve said, he's still trying to get people to stop breaking SPARC
> keywords, just like 3 years ago. It's just when trying to do anything
> larger than a single project that you run into issues.

People that do this sort of thing should have some sort of consequences.
The occasional accident is one thing, but there are people that become
"repeat offenders" with many of these sorts of issues, yet nothing is
done to them.  If there's no consequences, why should they bother
changing their behavior?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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

[Mike Doty]

Chris Gianelloni wrote:
[snip]
> How do you kick someone out of a project?  Currently, I know of no way
> to do so.

It's at the leads discretion.  For amd64 me and my OP leads talk it over
and make a decision.  I suspect that most leads simply don't have the 
balls to remove someone.  It's not an enjoyable task.
  .
> What process is required for someone to join a project?  Currently,
> anyone can add themselves to any project without any consent from the
> project itself.  The only real counter-examples to this are projects
> which require some kind of specific authorization to join, such as
> devrel or infra, since they have access controls.

It's also the leads discretion.  Were someone try to add themselves to a
project I run without chatting with me(or my OP leads) first, he'd find
himself quietly removed at best.

[snip]

--Mike
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Luca Barbato]

Mike Doty wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> [snip]
>> How do you kick someone out of a project?  Currently, I know of no way
>> to do so.
> 
> It's at the leads discretion.  For amd64 me and my OP leads talk it over
> and make a decision.  I suspect that most leads simply don't have the
> balls to remove someone.  It's not an enjoyable task.

Never had to do, probably because nobody really did anything to require
that, cleaning the herd from people not interested/active anymore on the
other hand...

>  .
>> What process is required for someone to join a project?  Currently,
>> anyone can add themselves to any project without any consent from the
>> project itself. 

> It's also the leads discretion.  Were someone try to add themselves to a
> project I run without chatting with me(or my OP leads) first, he'd find
> himself quietly removed at best.

Usually people ask to the leads/team before joining in...


lu

-- 

Luca Barbato

Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Wernfried Haas]

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On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 11:45:36AM -0400, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > As Weeve said, he's still trying to get people to stop breaking SPARC
> > keywords, just like 3 years ago. It's just when trying to do anything
> > larger than a single project that you run into issues.
> 
> People that do this sort of thing should have some sort of consequences.
> The occasional accident is one thing, but there are people that become
> "repeat offenders" with many of these sorts of issues, yet nothing is
> done to them.  If there's no consequences, why should they bother
> changing their behavior?

From the new conflict resolution policy (found at
http://dev.gentoo.org/~plasmaroo/policy.xml, will move to some more
official place soon):

--snip--
Issues not necessarily related to personal conflict, such as
intentional or repeated policy breaches, malicious or abrasive
behavior to users or developers, or similar developer-specific
behavioral problems should be brought directly to Developer Relations
via devrel@gentoo.org. These should be dealt with on a case-by-case
basis by Developer Relations and may require disciplinary action.
--snip--

So if by breaking the keyword someone breaks a policy, it is something
devrel should and will deal with.

cheers,
	Wernfried

-- 
Wernfried Haas (amne) - amne at gentoo dot org
Gentoo Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org
IRC: #gentoo-forums on freenode - email: forum-mods at gentoo dot org

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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:25:53 +0200 Wernfried Haas <amne@gentoo.org>
wrote:
| So if by breaking the keyword someone breaks a policy, it is something
| devrel should and will deal with.

Should, sure. Care to back up the will part?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail            : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Wernfried Haas]

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On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 06:29:03PM -0400, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> Quite frankly, I think that with a properly run community, there should
> be no need for a "Developer Relations" project, since it should be
> mostly self-policing.

With 300+ people, i severely doubt self policing would work. I assume
you were mostly thinking about conflict resolution when you wrote
this, but there are other things like 
- recruitment
- retirement of developers that 
  - quit
  - go AWOL
etc.

In an ideal world with a self-policing community this could work out,
however i rather tend to assume one of these things happen in the real
world: 
- People get recruited by anyone in whatever way and have no idea about
  our policies, breaking the tree in their first commit.
- Developers retire and no one removes their access due to lack of
  procedure
- Devs go AWOL, no one notices. If someone notices, perhaps he starts
  volunteering doing this kind of clean-up work, and technically a new
  devrel project emerges.

> Beyond that, the leadership should have the power
> and the ability to take care of problems in a timely manner without the
> need for droves of bureaucratic process.

The process (http://dev.gentoo.org/~plasmaroo/policy.xml) is
reorganized and should fulfill both your concern for a timely manner
and is much less bureaucratic. 

Also, there's a lot of stuff happening other than the conflict
resolution stuff with regard to ombudsman and often kloeri resolving
things - you don't read that on the news, but i'm not sure if council
members should spend a lot of their time to resolve silly conflicts
between devs, they're elected make decisions, not obsolete devrel. ;-)
Btw, the new policy also includes the possibility of refering a
decision to the council in certain cases, see "Resolution and Appeal".

> I'm sure nearly every member
> of devrel would agree that they would love to see a Gentoo where devrel
> simply wasn't needed.

I assume you're only refering to conflict resolution again, and i
agree it would be great. I just don't think this is ever going to
happen as long there are more than 50 developers.

cheers,
	Wernfried

-- 
Wernfried Haas (amne) - amne at gentoo dot org
Gentoo Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org
IRC: #gentoo-forums on freenode - email: forum-mods at gentoo dot org

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

[Wernfried Haas]

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On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 05:35:53PM +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:25:53 +0200 Wernfried Haas <amne@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> | So if by breaking the keyword someone breaks a policy, it is something
> | devrel should and will deal with.
> 
> Should, sure. Care to back up the will part?

Time travel is not possible, so i am not able to present you hard
evidence.

What i can assure you is that there is a policy that says so, and that
policies are there to be followed.
There also was one case of policy violation that resulted in a devrel
bug, and the issue was resolved (further details are dev restricted in
bugzilla iirc and i really don't want to name details, bug number or
names not to turn that into a witch hunt).

cheers,
	Wernfried

-- 
Wernfried Haas (amne) - amne at gentoo dot org
Gentoo Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org
IRC: #gentoo-forums on freenode - email: forum-mods at gentoo dot org

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

[Lance Albertson]

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Wernfried Haas wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 05:35:53PM +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>> On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:25:53 +0200 Wernfried Haas <amne@gentoo.org>
>> wrote:
>> | So if by breaking the keyword someone breaks a policy, it is something
>> | devrel should and will deal with.
>>
>> Should, sure. Care to back up the will part?
> 
> Time travel is not possible, so i am not able to present you hard
> evidence.
> 
> What i can assure you is that there is a policy that says so, and that
> policies are there to be followed.

The point we're making here is, policies mean nothing if they can't be
backed up. The past has shown that not to happen, and until there's hard
evidence to show that something is actively being done, then the
assumption that nothing will happen will stand. I don't care how many
policies you come up with, they mean absolutely nothing if you can't
actively deal with the consequences.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
GPG Public Key:  <http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc>
Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1  4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742

ramereth/irc.freenode.net


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

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 19:13 +0200, Wernfried Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 06:29:03PM -0400, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > Quite frankly, I think that with a properly run community, there should
> > be no need for a "Developer Relations" project, since it should be
> > mostly self-policing.
> 
> With 300+ people, i severely doubt self policing would work. I assume
> you were mostly thinking about conflict resolution when you wrote
> this, but there are other things like 

You assumed wrong.  While I was mostly thinking about conflict
resolution, I still don't think that in a properly run project there is
a need for an "HR" project.

> - recruitment

This goes into the whole thing about bringing people into the project,
as well as having a longer probation period.  The mentor should really
be responsible for the developer.  If things were working smoothly,
there really shouldn't need to be much work done for recruitment.
Remember, we're talking a meritocracy here.  We shouldn't just be
bringing on some guy because he says he'll do something.  We should be
bringing on people that have *proven* that they can and will do
something.

> - retirement of developers that 
>   - quit
>   - go AWOL

See, you missed that we're talking with the idea of people belonging to
a project.  If you work on my project and quit, I'll know.  If you go
AWOL, I'll know.  I can then simply ask Infra to remove your access.  It
really should be that simple.  If Infra is unable to do so due to being
understaffed, then they should get more staff.

> etc.
> 
> In an ideal world with a self-policing community this could work out,
> however i rather tend to assume one of these things happen in the real
> world:
> - People get recruited by anyone in whatever way and have no idea about
>   our policies, breaking the tree in their first commit.

Uhh... like this hasn't happened in the past?

> - Developers retire and no one removes their access due to lack of
>   procedure

If the developer belongs to a project, the manager knows it and asks for
their removal.  Is there need for any more procedure than that?

> - Devs go AWOL, no one notices. If someone notices, perhaps he starts
>   volunteering doing this kind of clean-up work, and technically a new
>   devrel project emerges.

See, you seem to be assuming that I haven't thought this through.  It
would be impossible for a developer to go AWOL without their
manager/lead/whatever you want to call them noticing if everyone were a
member of a project.  This doesn't mean you can only be on one project,
it means you must be on *at least* one project.  No more projects, no
longer a developer.  It's simple, yet effective.

> > Beyond that, the leadership should have the power
> > and the ability to take care of problems in a timely manner without the
> > need for droves of bureaucratic process.
> 
> The process (http://dev.gentoo.org/~plasmaroo/policy.xml) is
> reorganized and should fulfill both your concern for a timely manner
> and is much less bureaucratic.

It does not fulfill my concerns in any way.  Developer Relations is not
Gentoo's leadership.

> Also, there's a lot of stuff happening other than the conflict
> resolution stuff with regard to ombudsman and often kloeri resolving
> things - you don't read that on the news, but i'm not sure if council
> members should spend a lot of their time to resolve silly conflicts
> between devs, they're elected make decisions, not obsolete devrel. ;-)

With a proper structure, the council wouldn't need to be concerned with
this sort of thing.  Here's an oversimplified example.

You are in projects A, B, and C.  You haven't done anything for project
A in six months, and the manager has noticed, and removed you from his
project.  He looks to see if you are in other projects, which you are,
so he is done.  He *could* email the other project leads at this point
to see if you're still active, but it wouldn't be required.  Each
project maintains itself, after all.  Project B has done the same since
you haven't done anything for them in 3 months.  Project C's manager
notices that you haven't done anything in 2 months, with no word that
you were leaving.  He also notices that you aren't in any other
projects, so he reopens your dev bug and asks infra to retire you.
Process completed and no council involvement, whatsoever.

The same sort of process really should be used for conflict resolution.
Hell, at least our current policies dictate this, but it never happens,
in practice.  Instead, everybody goes directly to devrel.  If two
developers within a single project have a conflict.  It goes to that
project's manager.  If it is between two devs in two projects, it goes
to those two managers.  The only reason it would need council
involvement is if the managers cannot make a decision themselves, or
possibly on appeal.  There's really no other reason for council
involvement.

> Btw, the new policy also includes the possibility of refering a
> decision to the council in certain cases, see "Resolution and Appeal".

I've read the policy.

> > I'm sure nearly every member
> > of devrel would agree that they would love to see a Gentoo where devrel
> > simply wasn't needed.
> 
> I assume you're only refering to conflict resolution again, and i
> agree it would be great. I just don't think this is ever going to
> happen as long there are more than 50 developers.

Quit assuming I mean anything, you're batting zero for two right now.

Luckily, I wasn't asking if you thought it was possible.  I've merely
been stating that it should be possible.  There are countless projects
out there, many with many more developers than Gentoo, that are capable
of maintaining themselves quite well.  Why are we so different?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 19:27 +0200, Wernfried Haas wrote:
> What i can assure you is that there is a policy that says so, and that
> policies are there to be followed.

I thought that you'd been around long enough to laugh at this one,
yourself.  Sure the policies are there to be followed.  That doesn't
mean it always happens.  What if devrel becomes overworked and is unable
to police this sort of thing effectively?  At that point, the policy
will no longer be in effect, even though everyone will be trying their
best to keep it going.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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

[Stuart Herbert]

On 8/24/06, Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> A distribution is more than just an entity that packages upstream
> tarballs. I agree with your point, but it misses a large chunk of what
> we do.

We do more than that, sure, but the vast majority of the day to day
work in Gentoo is exactly that - packaging software released by
upstream, and fixing bugs reported back from users.

What do you do that goes beyond this?

> If this is the Gentoo vision, then why are we even doing anything else?

Because folks want to?  Because we've been recruiting people to
shoulder the load, instead of recruiting them into a culture?  Because
we want to see Gentoo run on a wider variety of hardware than
$upstream has access to?  Because we want to make Gentoo more
accessible to folks than it was in the past?

What activities are we doing that don't directly support the Gentoo vision?

> We've already reached our only goal, which is packaging stuff, and all
> we need to do is bump it.
>
> People need to feel that Gentoo is _moving forward_, that it's actually
> going somewhere.

We have no organisation that's going out there making deals with
commercial entities, ISV partners, nor users.  In that respect, we're
a completely different beast to RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu.

You're not the first, and you won't be the last, to complain that
we're not going anywhere.  My question is simple : where do folks want
to go, and what is stopping them getting there?  Seriously - what
exactly is this enormous brick wall that folks need a boost from
management to climb over?

> Then why wasn't the hierarchy fixed? Instead we somehow ended up in this
> huge metastructure debate and changed everything around.

It was hardly a "huge" debate, unless your only metric of measurement
is number of posts.  Take that debate, and then re-imagine it as an
event in the physical world, with folks having face to face contact.
You'll find that none of these debates are really that big.  They just
seem big, because electronc communications can be so inefficient.

Personally, I'm opposed to a return that that hierarchy.  The idea
that somehow desktop, server, and other such projects should sit at an
exclusive top-table doesn't work for me.

Gentoo would be much more effective with having a core management team
that covered our key operations (infra, devrel, userrel, pr, releng,
and 'tools' - portage and catalyst), and which ensured that they all
worked together to give the outward appearance of an organised
distribution.  Have management focus on what forms the "spine" of the
Gentoo organisation.

The lack of this management structure is, to pick one example, behind
the grief Infra are getting over the long-term problems with bugzilla.
 Folks aren't complaining about bugzilla any more; they're complaining
about the problem continuing.  Effective senior management would have
done three things in particular here which would each have made a
difference:

  a) They would have provided oversight on Infra's handling of the problems.
  b) They would have communicated effectively with the wider
organisation, explaining what was going on, why, and when it would be
resolved.  This communication would be early, it would be frequent.
  c) They would provide Infra with resources they can't get on their
own to solve the problem, including additional budget.

It's been agreed on -dev that it's not the existing Council's job to
do any of these things wrt the ongoing bugzilla problems.  So
everyone's left with a service that's not fit for purpose at the
moment, and only Infra to grumble about.  Everyone loses sight of the
steps Infra is taking to resolve matters, and nobody wins.

Your "top table" of herds does nothing to address what Gentoo really
needs.  It's a step backwards at best.

> "Official" votes, sure. But what about GLEP discussions on -dev? That's
> the only way anything major ever happens, and it might as well be a
> requirement for a unanimous vote among all ~350 developers. The only
> time I can recall even a single dissenter before a GLEP moved on to the
> council was brix on Sunrise.

I call bullshit on this.  Big time.

There are lots of major things happening all the time - you're one of
the people who make this happen - and they don't require GLEPs.  GCC
upgrades, X.Org 7, Portage 2.1, Gentoo Overlays, Java 1.5 - these and
many _many_ more are all major things for the users affected by them.

What major things do you want to see that aren't getting done because
of the perceived need for GLEPs?

It's also worth pointing out that we're hardly snowed under with
GLEPs.  There has been only 51 in the last three years; that's less
than two a month on average, and just under 50% of GLEPs were filed in
the first twelve months of the GLEP process's existance.

Your recollection is faulty; there _is_ no GLEP for sunrise.

> > The basic cause always comes down to weak or non-existent management.
>
> Yes, and that's exactly my point. We need stronger management.

We need _appropriate_ management.  You can over-manage something just
as easily as under-managing it.  Strong management is just as
misguided.  It leads to bullying, and certainly over here in the UK
there is serious debate about whether it has gotten so far out of hand
that the law needs changing to address it.

> > 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.
>
> That in itself is proof enough. There were numerous instances where it
> _should_ have been tested but wasn't, because of all the hassle required
> to do anything.

You're accusing devrel of not taking disciplinary action against
Gentoo devs because the process is too much hassle?  That would be a
very serious charge.

Or you're saying that Gentoo devs are not making complaints to devrel
because devrel's process is too much hassle?  In that case, why are
you complaining on -dev about it?  You know our conflict resolution
rules, and they don't include bitching about it on -dev.

> > Can you back this up with three examples in the last twelve months
> > where this has happened?
>
> Any long debate where more than 25% of the posts came from a single person.

I find that a poor criteria.  If you think about how few folks in
Gentoo are involved in any one area, and that most change usually has
one person acting as 'poster boy' for it, it's inevitable that you'll
end up with long debates matching that sort of criteria.

Please, provide specific examples to support your arguments.

> > Hrm.  Where is this lack of respect for devrel being displayed today?
> > What forms does this lack of respect take?  If there's a lack of
> > respect at the moment, it's not for devrel.
>
> How about in Gentoo's complete inability to do anything about the
> constant trolling and people acting like assholes?

How is that a lack of respect for _devrel_?  Wouldn't that be more
accurately described as a lack of respect between the trolls /
assholes and everyone else?

One person's troll isn't always another person's, as we'll see in a moment.

Who are the people you think Gentoo is completely unable to do anything about?

> We say we're about
> courtesy but we don't (can't?) do a damn thing about it, because it
> requires a huge, convoluted investigation and trial and nobody's willing
> to waste that much time.

What is stopping you fixing devrel?  And why are you complaining to
-dev about devrel?  Shouldn't you be complaining to _them_?  And if
your complaint to them has been unsuccessful, have you complained to
the council?  I can't find a record of that in the council logs (my
apologies if I've missed it).

I don't see how bitching on -dev is going to achieve anything - or how
it makes you any different from the unnamed folks you're complaining
about.

> I know this is partially changing, but I'm unsure that any group outside
> of the council will ever be trusted to suspend or kick people out.

The folks who don't accept devrel ... I don't see any reason why they
would accept the council on this matter.  These things don't seem to
be about _who_ is doing the kicking ... it seems to be more about
whether the kicking should be happening at all.

I don't see how bringing in a dictator is going to suddenly change the
trust in these matters, either.

> Some Debian developers commented on my blog about how valuable DebConf
> was for this.

I've been told the same from other groups too.  We'll see with the
trustee elections whether or not there's enough support for it amongst
Gentoo devs for it.

> > I'd also argue that we're _not_ powerless.  It wasn't pleasant, but
> > the old system has shown that we can deal with genuine trouble makers.
>
> Barely, and with enormous effort ...

If I wanted to fire an employee at work, the effort involved is
_substantially_ more than what we went through with that process.
Sure, we can learn from it and improve matters (and devrel are doing
exactly that; they're not exactly sitting around doing sweet FA about
it), but you have to see things in perspective.

> > We don't have a democracy.  Gentoo is largely a workocracy (there must
> > be a better word for it ;), where the vast majority decisions are made
> > by the folks who actually do the work.
>
> Only the small-scale decisions.

I can't agree with that.  I think that's demeaning to all the package
maintainers, arch teams, releng folks, and other staffers who each and
every day make decisions that are very important to the users that
they are focused on.

> > Folks don't vote on stuff.  To pick a recent example, none of the
> > folks who opposed Sunrise actually had any means to vote to prevent it
> > happening.  What they had to do was to lobby the council, who were the
> > only folks with a vote.
>
> Oh, gimme a break. Screaming about it on -dev for hundreds of posts
> isn't just equivalent to a vote, it's better. It makes people think
> there's more than 2 developers opposed to it.

Bullshit.

You're shifting the argument here.  You started by arguing that we
have a democracy - and that it's a bad thing - and when I give you a
real example of how folks didn't have a vote on something that was
important to them, you shift the argument to complain about folks
voicing their opposition.

For the record, there _were_ more than two developers opposed to it.
Both Ramereth and Kloeri have repeatedly voiced concerns about the
project.  It was me who suspended the project in the first place, and
referred the whole matter to the council for guidance.  That makes
five right there.

And even if there were only two, that's not important.  Chris and Brix
brought up many valid points, and their efforts ensured the
fundamental problems with Sunrise were sorted out before they became a
wider problem for Gentoo.  They did us all a favour in the long run.

I can't agree with your implied statement that they were trolling over
Sunrise, or being assholes.  I do agree that there was a lack of
respect with our rules - which _clearly_ state that projects can go
ahead with no announcements, no discussions; all they need is to
create a project page.  Sunrise followed those rules; I personally
made sure of it.

Those _rules_ created that mess, just as much as the Sunrise folks did.

But where was the outcry from folks, telling Chris and Brix to leave
things along, because Sunrise had followed our rules?  There was none.
 Where was the support for updating the rules, and ensuring that
another project couldn't do what Sunrise did the way they did it?
That was nowhere to be seen either.

Frankly, no-one seemed to give a damn about the rules either way.
That seems to be the real problem.

>From the perspective of what I work on, you've done _far_ more damage
with your comment on LWN about the Gentoo Overlays project than Brix
and Chris did with the Sunrise debate.  I think you have a bloody
nerve complaining about trolls and arseholes on here after so casually
dismissing the overlays project as "a hack to allow for
quasi-distributed development without using a distributed
version-control system such as git, mercurial, etc."  We set that
project up to strengthen our relationships with users, to help get
more folks involved in Gentoo, and you go to LWN of all places and so
casually dismiss it.

We're having a _terrible_ time getting folks outside Gentoo to take
any notice of what we do these days.  LWN was just about the only
mainstream place that mentioned it at all (even GWN hasn't covered it
yet, but I'm sure it will).

Don't _ever_ do that again to one of my projects.

> Untrue, voices make a democracy.

No, they just make a noise. It's widely accepted that you can't have a
democracy without freedom of speech, but speech alone does not make a
democracy.

> I'd rather get rid of devrel altogether (at least its conflict
> resolution role) and have the council deal with this.

Where would someone make their appeal to, after the council decides to
kick someone out?

> You say "unelected" like it's evil. In a company, nobody gets elected,
> but a hell of a lot of work happens.

We are _not_ a company.  We are a community; or at least, we're trying
our collective best to be.

There's nothing stopping you moving downstream and forming your own
company if you're passionate about adopting that model.  Just because
Genux was a total disaster, it doesn't mean that the idea's a bad one
in principle.

(As an aside, folks _do_ get elected in publicly-traded companies, and
plenty of companies are terrible at getting work done, which is why
many thousands of them close down each year, and why many more of them
have weak earnings/costs ratios.  It is competition which drives
progress, not whether you are a company or not.  The whole Linux
revolution will stand forever in history as proof of that).

> What vote? I'm not running for anything, and I have no desire to do so.

My mistake.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for you, and you do a
cracking job on the X11 stuff for Gentoo.  But your arguments in this
debate have been surprisingly inaccurate, vague, and badly thought
through.  I have such a high opinion of you from your Gentoo package
work that the low quality of your contribution here has really taken
me by surprise.

> I'm just trying to get people interested in fixing Gentoo so it's not
> stuck in the mud.

I respect that, but I don't see how you're going to change anything at
all going about it like this.

There's no detail in what you want to do, only a vague unhappiness
with how things are, a desire to return to the "good old days" that
never were, backed up by arguments that are demonstrably and factually
incorrect or incomplete.

What is your plan?  Where do you want to take Gentoo, where it isn't
already going?

Where is your vision, your strategy, your roadmap, your action plans?
What are your targets for the next quarter, half, year, and five
years?  What are your strategic project milestones, and what are the
enablers and tactical project milestones required to support them?
What are your resource requirements, and your budgets?  Which
organisations do you need to partner with, and which do you need to
engage as suppliers?  Which rivals do you intend to compete with, and
on what terms?  Which values do you need to adjust to gain new
markets, and create blue oceans?  Who are your senior staff who will
share and deliver these plans?  What do you need to do to get them
onboard?  Who are the core customers, and what are their values?  Who
are the opportunistic customers draining your resources, and how can
you get rid of them w/out pissing everyone off?

These are exactly the things that Mark Shuttlework and Canonical have
answers for, which is one of the reasons Ubuntu are successful at what
they want to do.

_If_ you're looking at Ubuntu with envious eyes, my advice is that you
cross the floor and join them.  There's no sense whatsoever in putting
Gentoo head-to-head with any of the other Linux distros, unless they
try to come after what we are good at.

> The goal?

The idea would be to devolve power to developers, so that folks who
are slackers / trolls / arseholes either have nowhere to go (and
therefore drop out by default), or at least are grouped together in
one tiny corner that the rest of us can ignore.  Most disciplinary
matters get delt with locally, and swiftly.  The ones that can't ...
well, they're exactly the ones where a trial by peers are appropriate.

The thing is, businesses have spent centuries looking for a magic
bullet for managing staff.  They've tried everything they could think
of, from outright slavery at one extreme to worker co-operatives at
the other.  If there was one true way to do it, there wouldn't be any
sort of debate about it.  But all forms of government come down to the
same fundamental - it only works if folks buy into it.

Best regards,
Stu
--
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Stuart Herbert]

On 8/24/06, Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> A distribution is more than just an entity that packages upstream
> tarballs. I agree with your point, but it misses a large chunk of what
> we do.

We do more than that, sure, but the vast majority of the day to day
work in Gentoo is exactly that - packaging software released by
upstream, and fixing bugs reported back from users.

What do you do that goes beyond this?

> If this is the Gentoo vision, then why are we even doing anything else?

Because folks want to?  Because we've been recruiting people to
shoulder the load, instead of recruiting them into a culture?  Because
we want to see Gentoo run on a wider variety of hardware than
$upstream has access to?  Because we want to make Gentoo more
accessible to folks than it was in the past?

What activities are we doing that don't directly support the Gentoo vision?

> We've already reached our only goal, which is packaging stuff, and all
> we need to do is bump it.
>
> People need to feel that Gentoo is _moving forward_, that it's actually
> going somewhere.

We have no organisation that's going out there making deals with
commercial entities, ISV partners, nor users.  In that respect, we're
a completely different beast to RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu.

You're not the first, and you won't be the last, to complain that
we're not going anywhere.  My question is simple : where do folks want
to go, and what is stopping them getting there?  Seriously - what
exactly is this enormous brick wall that folks need a boost from
management to climb over?

> Then why wasn't the hierarchy fixed? Instead we somehow ended up in this
> huge metastructure debate and changed everything around.

It was hardly a "huge" debate, unless your only metric of measurement
is number of posts.  Take that debate, and then re-imagine it as an
event in the physical world, with folks having face to face contact.
You'll find that none of these debates are really that big.  They just
seem big, because electronc communications can be so inefficient.

Personally, I'm opposed to a return that that hierarchy.  The idea
that somehow desktop, server, and other such projects should sit at an
exclusive top-table doesn't work for me.

Gentoo would be much more effective with having a core management team
that covered our key operations (infra, devrel, userrel, pr, releng,
and 'tools' - portage and catalyst), and which ensured that they all
worked together to give the outward appearance of an organised
distribution.  Have management focus on what forms the "spine" of the
Gentoo organisation.

The lack of this management structure is, to pick one example, behind
the grief Infra are getting over the long-term problems with bugzilla.
 Folks aren't complaining about bugzilla any more; they're complaining
about the problem continuing.  Effective senior management would have
done three things in particular here which would each have made a
difference:

  a) They would have provided oversight on Infra's handling of the problems.
  b) They would have communicated effectively with the wider
organisation, explaining what was going on, why, and when it would be
resolved.  This communication would be early, it would be frequent.
  c) They would provide Infra with resources they can't get on their
own to solve the problem, including additional budget.

It's been agreed on -dev that it's not the existing Council's job to
do any of these things wrt the ongoing bugzilla problems.  So
everyone's left with a service that's not fit for purpose at the
moment, and only Infra to grumble about.  Everyone loses sight of the
steps Infra is taking to resolve matters, and nobody wins.

Your "top table" of herds does nothing to address what Gentoo really
needs.  It's a step backwards at best.

> "Official" votes, sure. But what about GLEP discussions on -dev? That's
> the only way anything major ever happens, and it might as well be a
> requirement for a unanimous vote among all ~350 developers. The only
> time I can recall even a single dissenter before a GLEP moved on to the
> council was brix on Sunrise.

I call bullshit on this.  Big time.

There are lots of major things happening all the time - you're one of
the people who make this happen - and they don't require GLEPs.  GCC
upgrades, X.Org 7, Portage 2.1, Gentoo Overlays, Java 1.5 - these and
many _many_ more are all major things for the users affected by them.

What major things do you want to see that aren't getting done because
of the perceived need for GLEPs?

It's also worth pointing out that we're hardly snowed under with
GLEPs.  There has been only 51 in the last three years; that's less
than two a month on average, and just under 50% of GLEPs were filed in
the first twelve months of the GLEP process's existance.

Your recollection is faulty; there _is_ no GLEP for sunrise.

> > The basic cause always comes down to weak or non-existent management.
>
> Yes, and that's exactly my point. We need stronger management.

We need _appropriate_ management.  You can over-manage something just
as easily as under-managing it.  Strong management is just as
misguided.  It leads to bullying, and certainly over here in the UK
there is serious debate about whether it has gotten so far out of hand
that the law needs changing to address it.

> > 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.
>
> That in itself is proof enough. There were numerous instances where it
> _should_ have been tested but wasn't, because of all the hassle required
> to do anything.

You're accusing devrel of not taking disciplinary action against
Gentoo devs because the process is too much hassle?  That would be a
very serious charge.

Or you're saying that Gentoo devs are not making complaints to devrel
because devrel's process is too much hassle?  In that case, why are
you complaining on -dev about it?  You know our conflict resolution
rules, and they don't include bitching about it on -dev.

> > Can you back this up with three examples in the last twelve months
> > where this has happened?
>
> Any long debate where more than 25% of the posts came from a single person.

I find that a poor criteria.  If you think about how few folks in
Gentoo are involved in any one area, and that most change usually has
one person acting as 'poster boy' for it, it's inevitable that you'll
end up with long debates matching that sort of criteria.

Please, provide specific examples to support your arguments.

> > Hrm.  Where is this lack of respect for devrel being displayed today?
> > What forms does this lack of respect take?  If there's a lack of
> > respect at the moment, it's not for devrel.
>
> How about in Gentoo's complete inability to do anything about the
> constant trolling and people acting like assholes?

How is that a lack of respect for _devrel_?  Wouldn't that be more
accurately described as a lack of respect between the trolls /
assholes and everyone else?

One person's troll isn't always another person's, as we'll see in a moment.

Who are the people you think Gentoo is completely unable to do anything about?

> We say we're about
> courtesy but we don't (can't?) do a damn thing about it, because it
> requires a huge, convoluted investigation and trial and nobody's willing
> to waste that much time.

What is stopping you fixing devrel?  And why are you complaining to
-dev about devrel?  Shouldn't you be complaining to _them_?  And if
your complaint to them has been unsuccessful, have you complained to
the council?  I can't find a record of that in the council logs (my
apologies if I've missed it).

I don't see how bitching on -dev is going to achieve anything - or how
it makes you any different from the unnamed folks you're complaining
about.

> I know this is partially changing, but I'm unsure that any group outside
> of the council will ever be trusted to suspend or kick people out.

The folks who don't accept devrel ... I don't see any reason why they
would accept the council on this matter.  These things don't seem to
be about _who_ is doing the kicking ... it seems to be more about
whether the kicking should be happening at all.

I don't see how bringing in a dictator is going to suddenly change the
trust in these matters, either.

> Some Debian developers commented on my blog about how valuable DebConf
> was for this.

I've been told the same from other groups too.  We'll see with the
trustee elections whether or not there's enough support for it amongst
Gentoo devs for it.

> > I'd also argue that we're _not_ powerless.  It wasn't pleasant, but
> > the old system has shown that we can deal with genuine trouble makers.
>
> Barely, and with enormous effort ...

If I wanted to fire an employee at work, the effort involved is
_substantially_ more than what we went through with that process.
Sure, we can learn from it and improve matters (and devrel are doing
exactly that; they're not exactly sitting around doing sweet FA about
it), but you have to see things in perspective.

> > We don't have a democracy.  Gentoo is largely a workocracy (there must
> > be a better word for it ;), where the vast majority decisions are made
> > by the folks who actually do the work.
>
> Only the small-scale decisions.

I can't agree with that.  I think that's demeaning to all the package
maintainers, arch teams, releng folks, and other staffers who each and
every day make decisions that are very important to the users that
they are focused on.

> > Folks don't vote on stuff.  To pick a recent example, none of the
> > folks who opposed Sunrise actually had any means to vote to prevent it
> > happening.  What they had to do was to lobby the council, who were the
> > only folks with a vote.
>
> Oh, gimme a break. Screaming about it on -dev for hundreds of posts
> isn't just equivalent to a vote, it's better. It makes people think
> there's more than 2 developers opposed to it.

Bullshit.

You're shifting the argument here.  You started by arguing that we
have a democracy - and that it's a bad thing - and when I give you a
real example of how folks didn't have a vote on something that was
important to them, you shift the argument to complain about folks
voicing their opposition.

For the record, there _were_ more than two developers opposed to it.
Both Ramereth and Kloeri have repeatedly voiced concerns about the
project.  It was me who suspended the project in the first place, and
referred the whole matter to the council for guidance.  That makes
five right there.

And even if there were only two, that's not important.  Chris and Brix
brought up many valid points, and their efforts ensured the
fundamental problems with Sunrise were sorted out before they became a
wider problem for Gentoo.  They did us all a favour in the long run.

I can't agree with your implied statement that they were trolling over
Sunrise, or being assholes.  I do agree that there was a lack of
respect with our rules - which _clearly_ state that projects can go
ahead with no announcements, no discussions; all they need is to
create a project page.  Sunrise followed those rules; I personally
made sure of it.

Those _rules_ created that mess, just as much as the Sunrise folks did.

But where was the outcry from folks, telling Chris and Brix to leave
things along, because Sunrise had followed our rules?  There was none.
 Where was the support for updating the rules, and ensuring that
another project couldn't do what Sunrise did the way they did it?
That was nowhere to be seen either.

Frankly, no-one seemed to give a damn about the rules either way.
That seems to be the real problem.

>From the perspective of what I work on, you've done _far_ more damage
with your comment on LWN about the Gentoo Overlays project than Brix
and Chris did with the Sunrise debate.  I think you have a bloody
nerve complaining about trolls and arseholes on here after so casually
dismissing the overlays project as "a hack to allow for
quasi-distributed development without using a distributed
version-control system such as git, mercurial, etc."  We set that
project up to strengthen our relationships with users, to help get
more folks involved in Gentoo, and you go to LWN of all places and so
casually dismiss it.

We're having a _terrible_ time getting folks outside Gentoo to take
any notice of what we do these days.  LWN was just about the only
mainstream place that mentioned it at all (even GWN hasn't covered it
yet, but I'm sure it will).

Don't _ever_ do that again to one of my projects.

> Untrue, voices make a democracy.

No, they just make a noise. It's widely accepted that you can't have a
democracy without freedom of speech, but speech alone does not make a
democracy.

> I'd rather get rid of devrel altogether (at least its conflict
> resolution role) and have the council deal with this.

Where would someone make their appeal to, after the council decides to
kick someone out?

> You say "unelected" like it's evil. In a company, nobody gets elected,
> but a hell of a lot of work happens.

We are _not_ a company.  We are a community; or at least, we're trying
our collective best to be.

There's nothing stopping you moving downstream and forming your own
company if you're passionate about adopting that model.  Just because
Genux was a total disaster, it doesn't mean that the idea's a bad one
in principle.

(As an aside, folks _do_ get elected in publicly-traded companies, and
plenty of companies are terrible at getting work done, which is why
many thousands of them close down each year, and why many more of them
have weak earnings/costs ratios.  It is competition which drives
progress, not whether you are a company or not.  The whole Linux
revolution will stand forever in history as proof of that).

> What vote? I'm not running for anything, and I have no desire to do so.

My mistake.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for you, and you do a
cracking job on the X11 stuff for Gentoo.  But your arguments in this
debate have been surprisingly inaccurate, vague, and badly thought
through.  I have such a high opinion of you from your Gentoo package
work that the low quality of your contribution here has really taken
me by surprise.

> I'm just trying to get people interested in fixing Gentoo so it's not
> stuck in the mud.

I respect that, but I don't see how you're going to change anything at
all going about it like this.

There's no detail in what you want to do, only a vague unhappiness
with how things are, a desire to return to the "good old days" that
never were, backed up by arguments that are demonstrably and factually
incorrect or incomplete.

What is your plan?  Where do you want to take Gentoo, where it isn't
already going?

Where is your vision, your strategy, your roadmap, your action plans?
What are your targets for the next quarter, half, year, and five
years?  What are your strategic project milestones, and what are the
enablers and tactical project milestones required to support them?
What are your resource requirements, and your budgets?  Which
organisations do you need to partner with, and which do you need to
engage as suppliers?  Which rivals do you intend to compete with, and
on what terms?  Which values do you need to adjust to gain new
markets, and create blue oceans?  Who are your senior staff who will
share and deliver these plans?  What do you need to do to get them
onboard?  Who are the core customers, and what are their values?  Who
are the opportunistic customers draining your resources, and how can
you get rid of them w/out pissing everyone off?

These are exactly the things that Mark Shuttlework and Canonical have
answers for, which is one of the reasons Ubuntu are successful at what
they want to do.

_If_ you're looking at Ubuntu with envious eyes, my advice is that you
cross the floor and join them.  There's no sense whatsoever in putting
Gentoo head-to-head with any of the other Linux distros, unless they
try to come after what we are good at.

> The goal?

The idea would be to devolve power to developers, so that folks who
are slackers / trolls / arseholes either have nowhere to go (and
therefore drop out by default), or at least are grouped together in
one tiny corner that the rest of us can ignore.  Most disciplinary
matters get delt with locally, and swiftly.  The ones that can't ...
well, they're exactly the ones where a trial by peers are appropriate.

The thing is, businesses have spent centuries looking for a magic
bullet for managing staff.  They've tried everything they could think
of, from outright slavery at one extreme to worker co-operatives at
the other.  If there was one true way to do it, there wouldn't be any
sort of debate about it.  But all forms of government come down to the
same fundamental - it only works if folks buy into it.

Best regards,
Stu
--
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Grant Goodyear]

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Chris Gianelloni wrote: [Fri Aug 25 2006, 01:35:53PM CDT]
> See, you missed that we're talking with the idea of people belonging to
> a project.  If you work on my project and quit, I'll know.  If you go
> AWOL, I'll know.  I can then simply ask Infra to remove your access.  It
> really should be that simple.  

Unless I'm missing something, for your vision to pan out we would need 
a comprehensive project structure with every package and every aspect of
Gentoo development being part of a project that has an active and
competent lead.  One of the things that doomed the previous management
system was the fact that project leads who are both competent _and_
active tend to be in short supply.  (It's the _active_ part that really
tends to be the bigger problem.  Real life does tend to interfere, and
at least in the past we have lacked a good way to efficiently replace 
project leads who become less active.)

> If Infra is unable to do so due to being understaffed, then they
> should get more staff.

That's a bit like saying that if you can't afford something, you should
get more money.  It's a true statement, but it somehow ignores the fact
that doing so may be difficult.  *Shrug*  The last time I asked infra
about this, Kurt told me that their retention rate for new folks is
extremely low due.

> There are countless projects out there, many with many more developers
> than Gentoo, that are capable of maintaining themselves quite well.
> Why are we so different?

Perhaps because we compartmentalize rather less than most?  How
many people working on KDE are working on a broad swath of KDE?  Yet
it is common for Gentoo devs to be part of several different projects
while maintaining packages all across the tree.  Moreover, that's the
case not due to historical accident but to design: A gentoo dev w/ CVS
rights has the power to do (almost) anything.  Originally that level
of flexibility was intended to allow a very small number of people to 
reinforce each other, but even now it is something that sets Gentoo
apart.  My guess is that it also makes Gentoo devs less willing
to pigeon-hole themselves into a rigid project structure, but I don't
really have any evidence of that.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 20:41:16 +0100 "Stuart Herbert"
<stuart.herbert@gmail.com> wrote:
| Seriously - what exactly is this enormous brick wall that folks need
| a boost from management to climb over?

1. Portage.
2. Tree QA.
3. www.g.o.

Those three should get you started.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail            : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk


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

[Alec Warner]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> 
> From what I see, projects are pretty free to govern themselves. How do
> you see it differently?
> 
> As Weeve said, he's still trying to get people to stop breaking SPARC
> keywords, just like 3 years ago. It's just when trying to do anything
> larger than a single project that you run into issues.
> 
> Thanks,
> Donnie
> 

Projects that are by intention gentoo-spanning
(infra,qa,portage,council) all have issues.

QA:
QA doesn't want to step on toes, Halcy0n tried to give QA the power to
fix things and it failed.  Developers (nor gentoo) can say "we want good
qa!" but it seemed that the qa as the QA team define{s,d} it was
inappropriate, because there were numerous issues.

What kind of QA do we want, is a good question; because I don't think
anyone here knows, and it's something I'd like to see answered.

PORTAGE:
Portage developers are afraid to put anything new in the tree for fear
of breaking things (and somewhat rightly so).  But as noted, it also
means you get new stuff very infrequently.

I think the portage team has either done a poor job of bringing their
issues to the table; or the community has done a poor job addressing them.

INFRA:
Infra could be so much more as far as giving out access to do stuff, as
I see it now you have to be on rather good terms with them to get
anything done.  However a correlation here I've noted is that people
that seem to do work (and get noticed for it) have good relations with
infra and those that don't, well don't ;)

I don't really have a solution here, I'm not on infra; I realize that
you guys maintain a lot of stuff you have very little idea about, when
there is a problem in $area, you have a guy to cover that, but that
person isn't always available and it creates frustration.  I can see why
taking on new projects and ideas are difficult given the manpower issues.

COUNCIL:
The council technically has the authority to do most things,
being our elected representatives.  They don't do much; mostly this is
our fault as the community itself sets their agenda.  This is where I
think the current system fails, people are afraid to take issues to the
council.  Part of this is because issue X is "not appropriate for the
council", which I think is hogwash in many cases.  If they aren't doing
anything at these meetings I would think some global issues are being
repressed rather than assuming we have none to address (which many would
agree is false).  If the meeting agenda is empty, give them other issues
to work on.

-Random Rant Guy
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Alec Warner]

> PORTAGE:
> Portage developers are afraid to put anything new in the tree for fear
> of breaking things (and somewhat rightly so).  But as noted, it also
> means you get new stuff very infrequently.
> 
> I think the portage team has either done a poor job of bringing their
> issues to the table; or the community has done a poor job addressing them.
> 

So Brian Harring poked me on irc a bit, and I will expand upon this a bit.

This is not to say that the portage team does nothing (many members do
very little in terms of raw code, myself included which is why I left
the project).  Features get written, bugs get fixed, new versions get
released.  However there are what I would call key requirements that
Gentoo (the community and developers) require.  These requirements are
not getting met by the portage team.

The common point against this is "developers do what we want, we
volunteer"..etc.  I would think at this statement the community would
look for new team members (recruit) those able to complete the features
that are required.  You can't bitch at a team that doesn't implement the
things that are required.  However, you can't depend on a team like that
either.  That would be like me going to the  and making a reasonable
request and then being told that "they can't do that they are only
volunteers, and hell, it doesn't interest me."  The Portage Team should
have a duty to the community in this regard.

In the end I get a realization that a core team is a better idea than I
initially thought.  While in some cases turning down a request based on
"I'm a volunteer" is a reasonable request, there are areas where this is
not a good thing to have happen (Infra, recruiting, PR to some extent,
core-utilities).

I don't really want to criticize the portage team, it's filled with a
bunch of very knowledgeable folks.  However I don't think the team as it
stands now is helping Gentoo as a whole.  It is (as Ciaran mentioned
earlier in this thread) only holding Gentoo back.

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 22:36 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> From what I see, projects are pretty free to govern themselves. How do
>> you see it differently?
> 
> How do you kick someone out of a project?  Currently, I know of no way
> to do so.
> 
> What process is required for someone to join a project?  Currently,
> anyone can add themselves to any project without any consent from the
> project itself.  The only real counter-examples to this are projects
> which require some kind of specific authorization to join, such as
> devrel or infra, since they have access controls.
> 
> Who is responsible for an individual developer's work, aside from the
> developer?  If a developer joins a project and doesn't do what he's
> promised, nothing happens to him.  If he doesn't work his bugs, nothing
> happens.  Why not?
> 
> What if the developer does poor work?  This really ties into the above,
> but what happens if someone is found to not really possess the skills
> necessary to be in a project?  Right now, we cannot do anything about
> this person but hope that they either magically gain the skills, or
> leave the project on their own accord.

That's not true, from my reading of the developer handbook.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=5
says:

"Decisions within a project can be made by the people inside project
itself, of course coordination between the projects is necessary. The
(sub-)project leads are usually responsible for doing this."

As far as I'm concerned, project membership is a decision within the
project.

Thanks,
Donnie


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

[Wernfried Haas]

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On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 01:19:41PM -0500, Lance Albertson wrote:
> Wernfried Haas wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 05:35:53PM +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> >> On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:25:53 +0200 Wernfried Haas <amne@gentoo.org>
> >> wrote:
> >> | So if by breaking the keyword someone breaks a policy, it is something
> >> | devrel should and will deal with.
> >> Should, sure. Care to back up the will part?
> > 
> > Time travel is not possible, so i am not able to present you hard
> > evidence.
> > 
> > What i can assure you is that there is a policy that says so, and that
> > policies are there to be followed.
> 
> The point we're making here is, policies mean nothing if they can't be
> backed up. The past has shown that not to happen, and until there's hard
> evidence to show that something is actively being done, then the
> assumption that nothing will happen will stand. I don't care how many
> policies you come up with, they mean absolutely nothing if you can't
> actively deal with the consequences.

Ok, so i guess it boils down to:
You and Chris believe devrel won't do anything based on your personal
judgement.
I believe devrel will do something based on my personal judgement.

Neither of this points can be proven right or wrong other than waiting
how it turns out. I hope time proves things don't stay the same for
all the time and things can change.

cheers,
	Wernfried

-- 
Wernfried Haas (amne) - amne at gentoo dot org
Gentoo Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org
IRC: #gentoo-forums on freenode - email: forum-mods at gentoo dot org

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

[Wernfried Haas]

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On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 02:35:53PM -0400, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > Btw, the new policy also includes the possibility of refering a
> > decision to the council in certain cases, see "Resolution and Appeal".
> 
> I've read the policy.

Did i say you didn't?

> > > I'm sure nearly every member
> > > of devrel would agree that they would love to see a Gentoo where devrel
> > > simply wasn't needed.
> > 
> > I assume you're only refering to conflict resolution again, and i
> > agree it would be great. I just don't think this is ever going to
> > happen as long there are more than 50 developers.
> 
> Quit assuming I mean anything, you're batting zero for two right now.

What's the problem? I wasn't sure how you meant it, so i assumed you
meant it that way. As for batting zero for two, i never heard that
phrase before and have nfc what it means, but somehow that whole
statement doesn't seem very friendly to me.

> Luckily, I wasn't asking if you thought it was possible.  I've merely
> been stating that it should be possible.

Perhaps i'm misreading this comment too, but i'm taking that one
personal.

Screw you guys i'm going home.
Let's not waste any more bandwidth and time on it.

cheers,
	Wernfried      

-- 
Wernfried Haas (amne) - amne at gentoo dot org
Gentoo Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org
IRC: #gentoo-forums on freenode - email: forum-mods at gentoo dot org

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

[Duncan]

Wernfried Haas <amne@gentoo.org> posted
20060826101703.GA32678@superlupo.rechner, excerpted below, on  Sat, 26 Aug
2006 12:17:03 +0200:

>> Quit assuming I mean anything, you're batting zero for two right now.
> 
> What's the problem? I wasn't sure how you meant it, so i assumed you
> meant it that way. As for batting zero for two, i never heard that
> phrase before and have nfc what it means, but somehow that whole
> statement doesn't seem very friendly to me.

It's an allusion to baseball.  I'm /not/ a sports fan, but I do live in
the US, where baseball among others is popular sport and this phrase has
entered the popular culture from there.

The term "batting average" refers to a statistic in baseball, commonly
given as a three or four digit decimal fraction of one (Ty Cobb hit .3664
lifetime average, the record according to Wikipedia, with no pro player
hitting a seasonal .400 since 1941, see the reference below), that is the
ratio of actual hits to "at bats".  "Batting zero" refers to the zero
(.000) baseline one gets if they have no hits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batting_(baseball)#Success_in_batting

"Batting X for Y" then refers to the number of hits (X) for a given number
of at-bats (Y) in a specific game or season.

Within the US culture, then, "batting zero for X", where X is an
increasingly large number, is a reference to a poor record of successes
against tries.

Google says there's 11,000 indexed English pages referencing "batting
zero":

http://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&q=%22batting+zero%22

... altho only 141 referencing "batting zero for":

http://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&q=%22batting+zero+for%22

Taking a look at those will give you an idea of the usage, but here are a
three samples from the first page of returns on that 141:

* By my count, the Bush administration is batting zero-for-twenty.

* There was one stretch where I was batting zero for five on investment
banking jobs,

* Prior to this trip, United through Chicago was batting zero-for-ten (.000
for baseball fans) with regard to connecting me through O'Hare [airport]

That's the cultural context, then.  It's simply saying you've tried twice
and failed twice.  Yes, it's negative, unfortunately so given spyderous'
musings in the OP about useless flaming, but not unacceptably so in the
generic, particularly as zero for two isn't /so/ bad, compared to the
references above (0:3, 0:5, 0:20), or even compared to the original
baseball allusion, where 1/3 or .333 isn't all that shabby and you've yet
to take your third try.

You may however also wish to reference "strike out".  A batter gets three
tries.  The third strike without a hit and he's "out".  (The following
reference redirects to "strike zone", but that covers it.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_(baseball)

Again, I'm not a sports fan, but sports are part of the "cultural
literacy" in much of the world, and baseball is one such sport here in the
US, so it's something we know even if we /aren't/ particularly interested
in it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Sat, 26 Aug 2006 05:53:02 +0200 Wernfried Haas <amne@gentoo.org>
wrote:
| Ok, so i guess it boils down to:
| You and Chris believe devrel won't do anything based on your personal
| judgement.
| I believe devrel will do something based on my personal judgement.

Not so much personal judgement as past experience...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail            : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Stephen P. Becker]

Duncan wrote:
> Wernfried Haas <amne@gentoo.org> posted
> 20060826101703.GA32678@superlupo.rechner, excerpted below, on  Sat, 26 Aug
> 2006 12:17:03 +0200:
> 
>>> Quit assuming I mean anything, you're batting zero for two right now.
>> What's the problem? I wasn't sure how you meant it, so i assumed you
>> meant it that way. As for batting zero for two, i never heard that
>> phrase before and have nfc what it means, but somehow that whole
>> statement doesn't seem very friendly to me.
> 
> It's an allusion to baseball.  I'm /not/ a sports fan, but I do live in
> the US, where baseball among others is popular sport and this phrase has
> entered the popular culture from there.

Duncan, these are the kinds of emails that *really* piss everyone off. 
A simple "it's a baseball thing, google it" would have sufficed.  I know 
you must be really bored while locked up in your parent's basement with 
nothing to do but write dissertations on every possible random topic, 
but please, spare us.

-Steve
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Thursday 24 August 2006 02:17, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>
> If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy
> from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
> would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're
> to do anything about it.
>

I think you're right. I liked the way that gentoo was not a democracy. As it 
is now I think an indirect democracy is the way to go, where the council sets 
out the lines, makes decisions fast and before everything has been repeated 
over and over in the next huge flamefest. If one does not agree with the 
council, vote someone else the next year.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Thursday 24 August 2006 10:26, Wernfried Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 12:54:23AM -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > The council doesn't actually do anything AFAICT, it just "approves" GLEP
> > decisions that have already been made. So in effect we have no
> > leadership.
>
> Suspending sunrise was a decision, as was unsuspending it. However i
> agree that currently their main role is approving GLEPs and other
> decisions which makes them official Gentoo decisions.
> If that's a good or bad thing (tm) depends on the POV, i mainly think
> it's good to have it like that and no leader whatsoever.

A big issue, that I hope to correct is exactly this indeciciveness in the 
council. It is my position that the council needs to be proactive in 
decisions and in setting a goal for the distribution.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Friday 25 August 2006 21:41, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> Personally, I'm opposed to a return that that hierarchy.  The idea
> that somehow desktop, server, and other such projects should sit at an
> exclusive top-table doesn't work for me.

While I am partly responsible for setting it up I have to admit that not only 
did it not work then, it has never really worked. Worst of all was that most 
of the work being done was not part of any project at all. Attempts like 
desktop-research to develop some extra strengths for gentoo failed utterly. 
It opened my eyes that indeed an open source community distribution is not an 
organisation in the traditional sense.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Thursday 24 August 2006 16:58, Lance Albertson wrote:
> True, that might work, but then you run the risk of losing cohesion of
> what everyone knows. To me, the same person(s) should be at all those
> meetings if possible. Its better to have one or two people who know
> whats going on with all council-related stuff than one here, one there.
> It can become disjointed rather easily.

This actually comes down to a very real problem. It is almost impossible. 
Leading gentoo would be more than a full time job. As gentoo can not pay that 
(and it also burned Daniel down, as it is very lonely) this is not easy to 
achieve.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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

[Roy Bamford]

On 2006.08.24 01:17, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> I just posted this to my blog [1], but I know you don't all read it so
> I
> wanted to post it here as well. Do read all the way through. I very
> rarely write anything this long, and when I do, it's something I feel
> very strongly about.
> 
> I started my fourth year as a Gentoo developer in June, and Gentoo's
> changed a lot since I started back in 2003. We've become a drastically
> more democratic organization. But the question remains — _Is this a
> good
> thing?_
> 
> When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy
> years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference
> on
> the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going,
> we
> can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on
> pretty much whatever they feel like.
> 
> When I joined, Daniel Robbins was in charge, period. Seemant Kulleen
> and
> Jon Portnoy were basically his lieutenants. What Daniel said was what
> happened, and woe to anyone who angered him. This generally worked out
> pretty well, but _as Gentoo grew, it didn't scale_. Everything
> significant still had to go through Daniel for personal approval.
> 
> Shortly after I finished training and became an "official" developer,
> Gentoo gained its first real structure via Gentoo Linux Enhancement
> Proposal (GLEP) 4 — "Gentoo top-level management structure proposal".
> The GLEP process itself was quite new then; GLEP 4 was really only the
> second proposed GLEP (the first two were details related to the GLEP
> process) and the first one that was accepted. _Its goal was to improve
> communication and coordination as well as increase accountability_.
> 
> GLEP 4 formalized a hierarchy of so-called "top-level" projects —
> between 5 and 10 major areas into which everything in Gentoo could be
> divided. Daniel appointed the original project managers, who served
> under him.
> 
> Democratic elections entered Gentoo when we realized that we needed to
> create a new top-level project for all the desktop work, because it
> didn't fit into any existing project. Since managers already voted
> amongst themselves on GLEPs, it seemed like a natural extension for
> them
> to vote on a new manager. The call for nominations is archived online.
> I'd been a developer for around six months at this point, and by then
> I
> was the lead X maintainer. Brandon Hale was active in maintaining
> window
> managers and other miscellaneous applets and such. Turns out that the
> vote tied, so we became co-managers.
> 
> I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of a very
> slippery slope.
> 
> Gentoo used to be a courteous, friendly development community where
> nobody was afraid to speak his mind for fear of insult and injury. I
> see
> a clear correlation between the growth in democracy and the departure
> of
> courtesy. Once people are empowered to vote on every decision, rather
> than just having their discussion taken as input in a decision, they
> get
> a lot more vehement, argumentative and forceful about getting their
> way.
> _Flamewars and loud arguments going on for hundreds of posts have
> become
> commonplace, despite the occasional outcry_. Here's one such outcry,
> on
> March 20, 2006, to the private developers' list:
> 
>  What I've seen for the last 18 months or more is a general
> degeneration
>  in the attitudes of developers for their fellow developers. When I
>  joined, the attitude of people was friendly and welcoming. I screwed
>  up a couple of times. I didn't get my ass handed to me. I got picked
>  up, and comforted. And taught and tutored. ...
> 
>  So, we split from the Gentoo Technologies company, to a community
> owned
>  Gentoo Foundation. And now everyone was empowered. Everyone has a
>  voice. Some louder than others. The unfortunate thing is that with
>  this empowerment came a bit of assholishness. With rare exception,
>  we're pretty much all guilty of that. Someone makes a spelling error
> in
>  a commit, and that leads to flamefests on irc and mailing lists and
>  blog entries. And so on, ad nauseum.
> 
>  Frankly, I'm sick of it. It's burning people out. We're burning
>  ourselves out by being this way. It's time to stop this shit. To
>  everyone reading this, you've arrived at the important bit. From now,
>  please try this little thing. When you're on the mailing lists or the
>  fora or irc channels or in /query or somehow in the gentoo 'verse,
>  please try, just try, to be a little bit nicer to the people with
> whom
>  you're interacting. That's all. Have a little respect (even if not
>  deserved!). Listen a little. Hold back the snide comment, the
>  sarcastic remark. I don't mean to get all Oprah on you all, but I
> hope
>  you see my point -- just be nice for a change.
> 
> The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other
> developers being happy with any given situation.
> 
> The problem got so bad that our Developer Relations team wrote up an
> etiquette guide. Unsurprisingly, the same vocal minority that
> generally
> behaves like an ass and violates said etiquette guide erupted in
> flames
> over it, and it ended up fading into an existing but largely
> irrelevant
> piece of writing.
> 
> 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. 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.
> 
> All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming
> more
> influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about
> its
> members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun
> and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.
> 
> How can we do anything about this? As people such as Mike Auty have
> pointed out, the problem could be with the increasing barrage of
> rules,
> regulations and policies to which we're expected to adhere. Take a
> look
> at the FreeBSD committers' rules. Rule one is "Respect other
> committers," and rule two is "Respect other contributors." Take a look
> at the importance of courtesy and care to avoid creating long-term
> disagreements in rule one:
> 
>  Being able to work together long term is this project's greatest
> asset,
>  one far more important than any set of changes to the code, and
> turning
>  arguments about code into issues that affect our long-term ability to
>  work harmoniously together is just not worth the trade-off by any
>  conceivable stretch of the imagination. ...
> 
>  First calm down, then think about how to communicate in the most
>  effective fashion for convincing the other person(s) that your side
> of
>  the argument is correct, do not just blow off some steam so you can
>  feel better in the short term at the cost of a long-term flame war.
> Not
>  only is this very bad “energy economics”, but repeated displays of
>  public aggression which impair our ability to work well together will
>  be dealt with severely by the project leadership and may result in
>  suspension or termination of your commit privileges.
> 
> Or how about the Ubuntu Code of Conduct? The first two rules are "Be
> considerate" and "Be respectful." Again, note that these rules are
> actually enforced. As has been pointed out on the Gentoo development
> list, you can have respect without courtesy. But Gentoo needs both!
> One
> just isn't good enough.
> 
> But what about Gentoo? We don't have any overriding principles like
> this
> from which all of the standards for behavior derive. Instead, we have
> a
> large document explaining specifically and in detail what's allowed
> and
> what isn't, and even that is ignored. Because of the bureaucracy and
> the
> lack of respect for devrel's role, we're effectively powerless to do
> anything when people behave in a way for which the FreeBSD project's
> leadership would kick them to the curb.
> 
> I'm not the only one to suggest that a democracy isn't the most
> productive way to run Gentoo. When people wanted to change in how
> Gentoo
> was run, democracy was the only option considered, rather than simply
> changing the leaders. There's an ongoing assumption that if problems
> exist, it must be somewhere in the structure rather than in the
> people.
> 
> If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this
> democracy
> from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I
> would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if
> we're
> to do anything about it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Donnie
> 
> P.S. -- if you want the links, you can get them from my blog post.
> 
> 1. http://spyderous.livejournal.com/80869.html
> 
> 

I think the problem(s) stem from the way Gentoo is organised now. I'm
sure you will shoot me down if I'm wrong. In summary. Gentoo is a loose
knit group of packages with individuals belonging to one or more of the
herds that maintain them. The herd/team leads are supposed to 'get
along' but on occasions, this doesn't happen. Above them is the
council.

If that's wrong, stop reading here.

Lets define Management - its a process of planning, communicating the
plan, getting buy in from the team(s) who will execute the plan,
gathering feedback on progress and replanning. It looks cyclic but its
really a set of concurrent activities. Google PRINCE2 for the details.

At the top level, the council, in its present form does not manage
Gentoo. It can't, it's pretty much disempowered as a management
organisation due to the rules for its agenda setting. Further, don't  
see any any evidence of it setting targets and measuring progress or  
even getting progress reports. There has been another thread about that
already.

The team leads may very well Manage (see above definition) their teams
but I see no evidence of that happening for Gentoo as a single project,
nor of any body (individual or group of people) that's supposed or  
empowered to do it.

There are pros and cons of having an individual or a group of people
appointed to manage Gentoo. Hats discussed elsewhere in this thread
but at the moment it appears its not being done at all, which is the
cause of all the friction.

If the council are to undertake the management of Gentoo, its terms of
reference need to be drastically altered to allow them to undertake the
management process defined above.

All the Gentoo devs suffer from 'real life' they are all well aware
that management decisions are made for the the good of the project, not
to satisfy the self interests of the contributors (its good if it can
happen) so they understand they won't get their own way all the time,
just as in real life.

In short, Gentoo has a top level power vacuum, allowing what amounts to  
the 'power struggle 'we see today.

Regards,

Roy Bamford


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

[Duncan]

Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@gentoo.org> posted 1156678084l.9833l.0l@spike,
excerpted below, on  Sun, 27 Aug 2006 12:28:04 +0100:

> I think the problem(s) stem from the way Gentoo is organised now. I'm
> sure you will shoot me down if I'm wrong. In summary. Gentoo is a loose
> knit group of packages with individuals belonging to one or more of the
> herds that maintain them. The herd/team leads are supposed to 'get
> along' but on occasions, this doesn't happen. Above them is the
> council.
> 
> If that's wrong, stop reading here.

There are (as usual) details, but from my read, that's pretty close.

> Lets define Management - its a process of planning, communicating the
> plan, getting buy in from the team(s) who will execute the plan,
> gathering feedback on progress and replanning. It looks cyclic but its
> really a set of concurrent activities. Google PRINCE2 for the details.
> 
> At the top level, the council, in its present form does not manage
> Gentoo. It can't, it's pretty much disempowered as a management
> organisation due to the rules for its agenda setting.

An acutely accurate observation, AFAICT.

> If the council are to undertake the management of Gentoo, its terms of
> reference need to be drastically altered to allow them to undertake the
> management process defined above.

> In short, Gentoo has a top level power vacuum, allowing what amounts to  
> the 'power struggle 'we see today.

This is the best reading of the situation I've seen, IMO.  Good work!

Whether changing the rules to allow the council to manage appropriately is
politically doable or not remains an open question, and I'm not even sure
I'd back it myself if it is possible, but that's the best description of
where we are at that I've seen, which means we've gone along
way toward accomplishing the first step in any good debate, a proper
definition of the issue.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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

[Roy Bamford]

On 2006.08.27 22:37, Duncan wrote:
> Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@gentoo.org> posted
> 1156678084l.9833l.0l@spike,

[snip]

> 
> > If the council are to undertake the management of Gentoo, its terms
> > of reference need to be drastically altered to allow them to
> > undertake the management process defined above.
> >
> > In short, Gentoo has a top level power vacuum, allowing what
> > amounts to the 'power struggle 'we see today.
> 
> This is the best reading of the situation I've seen, IMO.  Good work!
> 
> Whether changing the rules to allow the council to manage  
> appropriately is politically doable or not remains an open question,  
> and I'm not even sure I'd back it myself if it is possible, but  
> that's the best description of where we are at that I've seen, which  
> means we've gone along way toward accomplishing the first step in any  
> good debate, a proper definition of the issue.
> 
> --
> Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
> "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
> and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman
> 
> --
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
> 

Changing the councils terms of reference is the easy bit. My
understanding is that under the present rules, it needs a GLEP to be
approved by the council, However, the rules only permit things to
happen. In a volunteer organisation, management is a particularly
thankless task, it can't be done with a carrot and a stick, the stick
does just not exist and the carrot is a bit small too.

Luckily 90% of management decisions can be purely arbitrary - all that
matters is that a decision is made. In most of these cases, its fine to
allow the recommendation from the teams to prevail, they will be doing
the work after all. Its the other 10% that cause all the friction,
where some individuals or group are going to be upset whatever decision
is made.

If the ruling body (Council ?) were a proactive planning body, rather
than a reactive adjudication body, many of these things would we seen
coming - they would not be the surprises they are today, which is what
upsets protagonists. Planning is not really the councils job.

I've just convinced myself that what's needed is a new Gentoo wide
project - Gentoo Planning that takes input from all the teams as to
what they want to do by when and collates it in an attempt to spot
potential conflicts. Gentoo Planning can then alert the parties to
allow a discussion to take place and refer any failures to agree to the
council.

Its more admin - and I hate admin ... but to trot out an old adage,
"if you don't have a plan, then plan to fail" is very true.

All this proposal amounts to is formalising the communications amongst
the teams - maybe a gentoo-planning mailing list would be adequate, to
which all teams posted plans and progress reports on a regular basis
and which was compulsory reading. Regular being defined by each team
from time to time, depending on planned activity.

Maybe gentoo-planning is a devrel subproject, since its concernded  ?

Regards,

Roy Bamford

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

[Wiktor Wandachowicz]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:

> When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy
> years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on
> the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we
> can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on
> pretty much whatever they feel like.
> 
> When I joined, Daniel Robbins was in charge, period. Seemant Kulleen and
> Jon Portnoy were basically his lieutenants. What Daniel said was what
> happened, and woe to anyone who angered him. This generally worked out
> pretty well, but _as Gentoo grew, it didn't scale_. Everything
> significant still had to go through Daniel for personal approval.

While I'm not a developer, I was thinking along similar lines some time ago.
Or make it like a year ago? Good leadership is important in many undertakings
of the real life, including (but not limited to) open-source projects.

After some time spent using Gentoo some comparisons against other known
projects naturally came to my mind. Linux kernel, Debian, PCLinuxOS - they
were first to think about. From these I concluded that in some brilliant
cases a project with a strong leadership, not fearing to make unpopular
decisions sometimes, progresses ahead nicely in the long run. From the
aforementioned three, Debian with its social contract, goals and the way it
is maintained is an exceptional phenomenon. It seems to me that the key to a
success lies in a good, respectful leadership, trust and good communication.

I'm sure that at least some of you read kerneltrap, but this recent topic
concerning NetBSD future (or lack thereof?) has some sad truths in it [1].

While I do not fear end of the Gentoo project (far from it!) I too sense
some lack of a general vision of where is it going now. Not delving into
philosophical considerations of democracy vs dictatorship I feel that the
current democracy approach Gentoo utilizes makes sense. But there are many
examples of healthy democracies, where citizens are seriously involved in
the process (western Europe countries, in general) as well as weak
democracies, where even though the process exists citizens feel powerless
(like in some new democracies in eastern Europe countries).

I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders,
developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible
page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project
leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision?
I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places?
And if it doesnt' exist I am convinced that it should be created, say, for
2007.0 release at least. Ubuntu has such plans, for one, so all developers
and users are able to learn what to expect from the upcoming release.
It also serves as a check list of what the expected goals were and what the
outcome was.

Maybe I should raise such concerns to the User Representatives first, but
the overall flow of ideas was IMO rather worth to be sent to the mailing
list in a complete form. If you feel otherwise, I apologize.

With best regards,
Wiktor Wandachowicz

[1] NetBSD: Founder Fears End Of Project
    http://kerneltrap.org/node/7061

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

[Richard Fish]

On 9/2/06, Wiktor Wandachowicz <siryes@gmail.com> wrote:
> I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders,
> developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible
> page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project
> leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision?
> I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places?

The problem I see is that for Gentoo the releases are not really
useful milestones for most projects.  A release is really significant
for a few core packages, but what is the real downside for users if
Xorg 7.2 is stabilized one week after a release?  Outside of the fact
that they have to compile it themselves instead of using the GRP
package...not much that I see.

For a distro like Ubuntu, a release is very significant, as it is the
platform that users will be running for the next 6-18 months.

Do you think Ubuntu roadmaps would be useful without being tied to a
release?  Or could project status reports (as discussed here recently)
fit the same bill?

> Maybe I should raise such concerns to the User Representatives first

No, definitely not.  The point of user reps (of which I am one) is not
to filter communications between devs and users, but to improve the
communications between the two camps, among other things.  If you want
to bring an idea up here directly, nobody should respond with "talk to
your userrep".

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

[Wiktor Wandachowicz]

Richard Fish wrote:

> > I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders,
> > developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible
> > page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project
> > leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision?
> > I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places?
> 
> The problem I see is that for Gentoo the releases are not really
> useful milestones for most projects.  A release is really significant
> for a few core packages, but what is the real downside for users if
> Xorg 7.2 is stabilized one week after a release?  Outside of the fact
> that they have to compile it themselves instead of using the GRP
> package...not much that I see.

After using Gentoo for a good while I appreaciate very much the "constant
development" policy, which prevents the need to upgrade my system to new
releases. I've seen one Ubuntu user dist-upgrading its installation - it went
with some problems, and they were substantially bigger than I'm having doing
occasionally "emerge -avuD world".

But to be honest, stabilization of packages was not my point. ((BTW, stable
X.org, KDE or GNOME would IMO delay the release for a week, so users wouldn't
need to upgrade in such a short time frame - but that's what I think))

I was rather thinking about bigger, user-visible changes. Obviously a big
version bump of widely known and used package would fit this category, too.
Good news could include, for example, new stable kernel + udev (with better
support for [many-nice-features]), GNOME/KDE/XFCE/etc, even easier installer,
Gentoo-branded themes (Grub, splash, gdm theme, wallpaper, icons, colors (?)),
stable porthole, improved portage... These are the things people are looking
for - better, faster, easier. Opportunistic? Yes. Drugery for developers to
come up with such a list and then hold their word in time? Yes. Is it needed
at all? IMO, yes.

> For a distro like Ubuntu, a release is very significant, as it is the
> platform that users will be running for the next 6-18 months.

And for Gentoo it's about 6 next months where new blood, umm.. new users
/the beloved newbies ;)/ come to the project based on the reviews in news
sites. I, for example, got to know about Gentoo after reading a good review
on the site I was visiting quite often (linuxnews.pl). When I took a look
at the Handbook by the first time I was sold immediately. I was thinking
for a long time about installing LFS and only the time was an issue. Then
here came Gentoo and my world changed... for better.

Having said that, releases are targeted mostly for new users. Release media
become more and more filled with features and are more user-friendly than
ever (GNOME running from LiveCD, graphical installer, and so on). Lots of
*visible* changes (even though they are minor or trivial) buy new hearts and
minds for Gentoo. Do you now see what I've meant?

I'm not imposing that Gentoo development should depend on a time-based
milestones but new releases of installation media do happen and are needed.
It would be easier for journalists, newbies, etc. to compare Gentoo against
other distros if some kind of list of features that would-be-nice-to-have
before every release existed.

> Do you think Ubuntu roadmaps would be useful without being tied to a
> release?

Of course not. But that's exactly why people know beforehand that Dapper
would contain one list of features and be stable, while Edgy (advertised
as developers' dream) can be somewhat rough but most probably will contain
another list of new and exciting features. Example [1].

> Or could project status reports (as discussed here recently) fit the
> same bill?

Thanks for pointing this out. Need to re-read the archives.

With best regards,
Wiktor Wandachowicz

[1] "Upstart in Universe"
    http://www.netsplit.com/blog/work/canonical/upstart.html

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

[Luis Francisco Araujo]

Richard Fish wrote:
> On 9/2/06, Wiktor Wandachowicz <siryes@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its 
>> leaders,
>> developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible
>> page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project
>> leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision?
>> I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places?
> 
> The problem I see is that for Gentoo the releases are not really
> useful milestones for most projects.  A release is really significant
> for a few core packages, but what is the real downside for users if
> Xorg 7.2 is stabilized one week after a release?  Outside of the fact
> that they have to compile it themselves instead of using the GRP
> package...not much that I see.

That is not a problem. That is a feature.


-- 


Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
Gentoo Linux


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

[Chris Gianelloni]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1102 bytes --]

On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 07:15 +0000, Wiktor Wandachowicz wrote:
> But to be honest, stabilization of packages was not my point. ((BTW, stable
> X.org, KDE or GNOME would IMO delay the release for a week, so users wouldn't
> need to upgrade in such a short time frame - but that's what I think))

People seem to think that the Release Engineering team doesn't talk with
the GNOME/X/KDE/kernel teams.  We *know* when they're planning on going
stable and we work with them.  How do we know this?  Was *ask* them.
Here's a good example.  We took our snapshot for 2006.1 *before* GNOME
2.14 went stable on *any* arches.  However, we worked with both the arch
teams *and* the GNOME team to mark it stable in our snapshot on
architectures who wanted to participate.  Why did we do this? to avoid
this exact situation.

I really wish people would take the time to either ask the Release
Engineering team, or learn how we work before they go off making
accusations against us.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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

[Richard Fish]

On 9/3/06, Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Richard Fish wrote:
> > The problem I see is that for Gentoo the releases are not really
> > useful milestones for most projects.  A release is really significant
>
> That is not a problem. That is a feature.

A small clarification may be necessary here.  I wasn't pointing to a
problem with the way Gentoo evolves, but with the idea that releases
could be useful milestones for project roadmaps.

-Richard
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gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[Richard Fish]

On 9/3/06, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I really wish people would take the time to either ask the Release
> Engineering team, or learn how we work before they go off making
> accusations against us.

There was no accusation there.  I picked on X only for its popularity
and relative ease of upgrading.  But it is fair to say that I have no
clue how releng actually works, and how you choose what to put in the
snapshot, although I expect that there is much more to it than picking
a random date on the calendar.

-Richard
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