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

[Wernfried Haas <amne@gentoo.org>]

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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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