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

[Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk>]

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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