On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 03:32:58PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > (Again, campaigning period doesn't start until Sunday. Please feel free > to ignore this until then)
Platforms are up (except one), so... > This is about the DPL team. Andreas, your platform was quite heavily > based on it. Jeroen, I understand that it's something that you were > heavily involved in. According to Andreas's platform, it was supposed > to: > > * distribute workload, avoiding burn-out and problems related to > real-world unavailability of individual developers; > > Did this happen? Branden has been fairly noticably absent in terms of > providing leadership - queries to [EMAIL PROTECTED] have gone unanswered for > long periods of time. I cannot make generic statements for responses to leader@, as they were not automatically forwarded. As I wrote in my platform[1]: | An important thing I learned is that in order for such a team to work | effectively, it is required that the whole team is involved in (at least | informed of) all what's going on, and that an agenda is maintained and | enforced, and ensuring that assigned (delegated) tasks are fulfilled. I notice I didn't write it explicitly, but I will request leader@ mail to be forwarded to the full team -- if people have issues that really should be 'for my eyes only', [EMAIL PROTECTED] would work. Of course I will announce so to d-d-a, so that people know there's a slightly broader distribution of such mail. As to your question of workload distribution, there was a bit of that, but not really many numerous issues -- a number of very hard issues were worked on with the whole team though. > * keep regularly in touch with a larger part of the project, to be more > proactive about difficulties, and detect them earlier; > > The DPL team's communication sucked. What would you do differently, and > how would you do it? I'll have reserved a few hours each week to do exclusively leader-type things. I'll simply put on the team's year-agenda to have the 4 promised public reviews, which will at the bare minimum include what has happened. I choose the interval carefully to be often enough, but still not too frequent to have awkward issues like "eh, nothing happened this week, we'll keep silent". In addition, you'll hear from me directly via the "insider reports", with which I'll also try to regularly choose areas where there was DPL (team) involvement. Other than the 4 reports, I will send mail to d-d-a or whatever appropriate list when something significant happens, for example, w.r.t. the Code-of-Conduct installment process. > * help build broader consensus by functioning as a 'chair' in Debian; > > This didn't really happen either, did it? How would you make sure it > did next year? Individual DPL team member contributions did help a bit, but well, not very successfully. I'm afraid the state of the lists is such that building consensus merely by providing insightful mails (a significant number of people is providing insightful comments to threads, but it's hard to find them among all the noise). In a way, my view was too optimistic. By improving the atmosphere and productivity of the lists in general, I believe it will be better possible for consensus being reached, without per se direct consensus-building by the DPL team members, but because *anyone* can help finding a good solution. A compromise can best be found by those that are intimately familiar with the subject in question. > * make sure that decisions that need to be made are really made, even > though that means to keep track of a lot of things, takes time and > perhaps requires to be in multiple places at the same time; > > What would you say are the most important decisions that were made by > the DPL team this year? How many of them could not have been made > without the DPL team? You misunderstood the point, it was about the practice of discussions turning around in rounds without yielding a conclusion. When I noticed the nvi vs vim discussion wasn't going anywhere, I started a poll about it, as I did with the maintainer field issue for derivates. Such decisions shouldn't be made by any DPL or DPL team, but by the respective responsibles. I still need to send prods to see that both of those issues to a resolution of some sorts now that discussion faded away on both and there's some view on what people think. > * have the most appropriate person be responsible for their areas of > expertise. Everyone has unique talents and motivations which make > certain tasks more enjoyable for them than for others and lets them deal > with them more efficiently. > > Who were the members of the DPL team? What areas were they responsible > for? If you retain the DPL team, would you make any changes? Branden Robinson, Steve Langasek, Bdale Garbee, Enrico Zini, Andreas Schuldei, Benjamin Mako Hill, and myself. There was no strict division of labour, but Steve was involved in those times things were about Release and release-related issues, and generally at most times for sensible advice, Bdale mostly for issues dealing with companies, and advice where there was need for mediation, being a very broadly respected guy. Branden himself was definitely the specialist on financial areas, and I myself was working amongst others on some of the infrastructure bits. This is all just a global idea of some example specialisms I could think of. I will definitely have a different team proposed, which as you can seen now in my platform, will be announced in less than two weeks from now. Some people will stay, I think continuity is important, and it makes it easier for me to have at least some people I've already built up a good trust relation with. Suggestions, including nominations of oneself or others, and even 'rather not this person', welcome privately. > A couple of the implementation details: > > * The team meets regularly and frequently (weekly, up to 1h), to discuss > new issues and review ongoing tasks. > > This seemed to be dropped pretty quickly. Do you think that was the > right decision? To drop it? In retrospect, no, it made the agenda become more chaotic, and didn't have 'sync' moments in the issues working on. For example, when 4 meetings in a row a topic has yielded 'still no result', one needs to think of alternatives. I was a bit disappointed that it didn't seem to be possible, so will be more clearly demanding a bit of commitment to at least attend once every 2 weeks, and continue meeting even when some people cannot make it. > * Public minutes of private meetings are made available where discretion > allows; likewise, a public agenda is made available in advance listing > all non-sensitive agenda items, in order to allow and invite public > discussion and public feedback before decisions are made. > > This never really happened. Do you think that was the right decision? > Why did somebody have to notice that DPL team activity reports had > stopped some time ago before anybody on the team publicly admitted > this? It happened in the beginning, but due to fixed meetings stopping, also the whole pre- and post-meeting bits unfortunately went into unuse. It takes energy to reverse such trend, and nobody in the team did find that energy in the end. Trolling through mail and IRC logs is also much more cumbersome than summarising a shortish meeting where all items are passing by. --Jeroen -- Jeroen van Wolffelaar [EMAIL PROTECTED] (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357) http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
