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

["Kevin F. Quinn" <kevquinn@gentoo.org>]

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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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