Re: [gentoo-project] Council meeting 2015-01-13: call for agenda items

[Rich Freeman <rich@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 9:22 PM, hasufell <hasufell@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> No, you don't need a project lead. You can just say any member can speak
> for the whole project at any time. Whether that works or not, is a
> different thing, but it's a valid model.
> Decisions can be reached by whatever method you want, with or without a
> lead.
>
> What matters is that the project is _functional_ and _responsive_. How
> they do that should be up to the and should not be specified anywhere.
>

Well, as long as everybody agrees there is no need for rules.  The
rules come into play when people disagree.  Nobody is suggesting that
project members can't just speak for the project if that is how the
project wants to operate.  However, when there is disagreement then it
makes sense to allow an elected lead to step in, otherwise everybody
is just going to appeal to the council, which is after all intended to
be the escalation path for stuff projects can't handle on their own.
I'm sure the Council members don't want to be stepping into every
little debate, and I'm even more sure that everybody else doesn't want
that either.

I think some kind of standardization is useful just so that people
know how to engage projects.  However, if we want to have projects
specify their own engagement/escalation models I don't have a problem
with that.  Of course, if the project can't bother to elect a lead,
I'd be shocked if they actually reached a formal consensus on some
other governance model.

I don't think anybody wants to increase the level of formality.

--
Rich