Re: [gentoo-project] Questions for Gentoo Council nominees: Power balance

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

On 6/15/19 12:00 PM, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Jun 2019 12:42:20 +0300 Andrew Savchenko wrote:
>> Hi all!
>>
>> Last year we had a good initiative: it addition to (or even instead
>> of) manifests nominees were asked questions by voters. So let's
>> continue this year.
>>
>> I propose to have one question per thread spawned by this e-mail to
>> keep discussion focused. If you have multiple questions, please
>> start multiple threads. If your question was already asked, please
>> join a thread.
>>
>> I'll ask my questions in subsequent e-mails.
> 
> Gentoo power balance was carefully crafted over the years. However
> during last year that balance was disrupted:
> 
Over the years there were lots of changes. The recent changes are not
/that/ unusual, so I don't see it as a disruption of the balance more
than previous changes.

> 1. The same person can now be in the Gentoo Council and the Trustees
> board.
I don't directly see that as a problem. But both Council and Trustees
seem to have a lack of members with enough time already, so not having
time in two places sounds inconvenient

> 2. QA can now bypass Comrel on bans.
Every decision involving QA and ComRel upsets someone.
The goal of these rules is to contain and isolate bad actors, now we
have ... infra, qa, comrel at least, able to act. I'm not sure if
delegating capabilities to that many groups make sense, but there are
good arguments why any of them should be able to act.

> What is your opinion on this?
> Should this balance be left as is?
> If it should be tuned, then how?
> 
> I'm worried about that some people or teams may gain too much power
> and misuse it.
> 
Those with more free time already have a disproportional effect, should
we limit their acceptable amount of contributions?

If you're worried about people pushing things the wrong way the only way
I see to fix it is to recruit allies (e.g. recruit new devs who have
ideas similar to yours, or motivate existing devs to work on a problem)
and spend time on bending things more towards your ideals.