Hi, Thanks for the reply. Having read this, I think that the problem lies at what each of us identifies as "local team", we are clearly thinking of different things. I wish we could have had this discussion at DebConf.
When I say that there should be a local team, it does not mean that members of the local team cannot participate in the global team. Of course, each and everyone of the members of DC16 organization that were present at DC15 (or previous DebConfs, but I think all of them were at DC15) are -in my vision- both part of the local and the global team. When I advocate for the local team it's not for these people, but for the volunteers that will show up along the way. For those volunteers, joining debconf-team is traumatic. There's too many flamewars, too many things going on at the same time, and they have no idea how to fit into the already existing structures, they just want to help. I've heard this comment many times in the past, and even this year, from people that had been part of Debian for a long time, but had no idea how flamewary debconf-team was. We need those volunteers, we need to be able to delegate stuff towards them, otherwise the DC16 organizing team has too big of a burden. But asking those volunteers to join debconf-team, follow the tons of discussions, follow the IRC meeting on #debconf-team, etc, has been proven to be too much. They just don't, which makes it much harder to integrate them so there's a high chance that you'll lose them. Of course, if any new recruits that join that local team feel like they want to integrate into the global structure they are totally welcome to join. It's not like being part of the local team precludes taking part in content, fundraising, or any other teams. It's just that it's not a pre-requisite to understand and fit into the structure in order to volunteer for working towards DC16. In my experience, the group of local volunteers will form whether you want it or not. This year we operated under the "there is no local team" rule, and we still had plenty of people that helped and showed up only because it was in Germany. Some of them went away because they didn't feel like they fit into the structure, and plenty of them stayed even though they were not part of any of the official teams. The point is that this local team existed even if it was not allowed to exist according to the structure. This will happen for DC16 as well. There will be Southafricans that will join the team and want to help. The easier you make it for them to *belong*, the more motivation and energy they will have to work on DC16. On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 1:52 AM, Allison Randal <[email protected]> wrote: > - Another supporting reason was to clearly define who would be working > on social activities like the day trip and evening events, but there's > no reason that has to be exclusively local people, so it made more sense > to just create a Social Activities team. We had a similar conversation > around budget and facilities, where it makes more sense to combine > people with varying levels of experience and proximity, rather than > artificially segmenting the work. I don't object to these new teams. I just want to point out that the intention of the original team structure was to ensure that people stayed on the teams through the years. These teams will have an extremely high turn-over (i.e. most members will only be members for one DebConf). In my original proposal, only the local team would have such a high turnover, but I'm fine with accepting that there's a bunch of teams in the same situation. These teams do not solve the problem described above, local volunteers still need to figure out which team out of Facilities, Social Activities or Finances they fit in, and that's already a rather high barrier for new recruits. There are also many local tasks that don't fit that structure, like: visa help, child care, printing t-shirts, documenting how to go from the airport to the venue, documenting things that people need to remember before travelling, publicizing the open part of the event in local places, and many others. > Chill out, feel the beat of the African drums, pour a glass of Pinotage, > and join the fun. It's going to be a great year. :) I don't doubt this, every year DebConf is a great even despite all the flamewars that go on through debconf-team. But this doesn't mean that there are no things that we can learn from past experience. My main point is: the less you delegate, the more you burn out; you need a large team in order to delegate to them, so it makes no sense to make it hard for that team to grow; the "catch-all" local team is for this. -- Besos, Marga _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
