Re: [gentoo-project] On the way Devrel is constituted

[Rich Freeman <rich@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 8:50 PM, Alexis Ballier <aballier@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> So that the council controls everything: they nominate the judges
> (devrel) and are the appeal court. I consider this even worse.

The council is elected.  No sane organization (democratic or corporate
or whatever) just has a self-appointing judiciary.  I'm not convinced
we even need an independent judiciary, but nations that have
independent judiciaries still have elected representatives appoint
them.  They also often have a means for elected officials to overturn
their decisions (at least in the direction of pardons).

Corporations have elected boards appoint executives who appoint the
members of HR/Security.  Democracies elect representatives who appoint
members of the judiciary.

My feeling is that QA and Devrel should be council appointed.  They
can of course recommend their own members, and Council can give
whatever deference they feel is appropriate to the recommendation.

If you wouldn't trust somebody to appoint QA/Devrel members, then you
shouldn't be electing them to the Council.  Likewise, if you wouldn't
trust somebody to not just seize control of the entire distribution
(infra, DNS, bank accounts, the Gentoo name, firing the Council, etc)
you shouldn't be electing them to the Trustees (a few years ago our
sole remaining Trustee was contemplating basically just turning the
entire distro over to a benevolent dictator (our founder), who legally
wouldn't be accountable to anybody including the Council (or even the
devs in general depending on whether the bylaws were modified)).
These are real governing bodies that essentially have all the powers
you don't want to give to anybody (well, save unelected QA/Devrel team
members) whether you like it or not (at least within the boundaries of
the Foundation charter/bylaws).

I agree with hasufell's recommendation, although I would extend it to
QA as well.  QA and Devrel are "special" projects and should probably
be accountable to the Council.  I think they should be largely
self-governing much as infra is (even though infra is fairly dependent
on the trustees for funding/etc).  It isn't about control so much as
accountability and mandate.  I'd of course recommend that the Council
should be hands-off as long as things are going well, and there really
isn't anything that suggests they wouldn't be (certainly this has been
the trend with both the Council and Trustees).

Part of me is thinking that we should just write up this proposal as a
GLEP and go from there.  By all means devs should register their
opinions on it as it firms up, and we can leave it to the new Council
to decide how to handle it.

Rich