Hi Andre,
On Sat, 2008-08-02 at 13:16 +0200, André Schnabel wrote:
> You mean code writers. Product development needs much more than code
> writing.
Sure - code writers, the people we are missing enough of in the
project :-)
> So maybe you need to think about structure of the projects first. For
> the projects I've been involved in, Project Leads have been on a
> meritocratic base.
In general, I would not say that project leads are not generally worthy
etc. etc. but it is fairly easy to contribute substantially to the
project without ever becoming a project lead: working lightly in many
areas across the board for example (at least that is my experience).
Also, there is really no need to hope that project leads represent
their constituency if there are other good ways to get their
constituencies to simply vote electronically :-) indeed, it's way
simpler and requires little to no effort, conflicts of interest etc. on
their behalf.
> But - and this is the point about project leads that I know: nobody
> could become project lead (or stay project lead) for a long time, if she
> does not represent the will of the project members.
That is not so. There are some particularly amusing examples of
non-people who have remained project leads for a while; hopefully
Fridrich can enlighten us. It is also pretty hap-hazard who becomes a
project lead, what is a "project", eg. "KDE" integration is an official
project, but GNOME integration (which is more complete) is not, and so
on ;-)
> > This is why I would very strongly prefer a simple metric, or membership
> > process, tied to people's actual, concrete contribution of development
> > effort over the last time period.
>
> So please provide this simple metric! And don't claim that "this might
> exist already somewhere".
Sure - I attach a list of people who have contributed > 100 lines of a
given type of file (.cxx, .hxx, and a few others) to OO.o CVS over the
last few months, with the rel-engs tacked onto the end. It is generated
from a simple CVS file parser python script, available on request.
This is a great place to seed a membership list I'm happy to sit on a
body to help maintain it; and - tragically I myself am not on it ;-)
[ so there must be a bug somewhere ] - this is perhaps a side-effect of
it not taking account of patches committed by other people and my
loathing of the QA process around CWS'; there will always need to be
some user-tweaking of the result, but this shouldn't be controversial.
> > Yes as you say - IMHO the Project Leads are an extremely poor
>> proxy for merit;
>
> So the concept of the project leads seems to be plain wrong. But as said
> - for the projects that I know, project lead is a very good proxy for
> meritocracy.
Fair enough; for the ones I know many of the project leads are great
guys, but there are lots of people with merit who are not project leads,
and there seems no sane way to evolve that. Looking at the list, I see a
number of interesting non-Sun people that would otherwise be
disenfranchised completely [ not to mention a load of Sunnies that
deserve a vote IMHO ]:
"rene","Debian"
"timseves","SIL"
"tmorgner","Pentaho"
"ydario","Serenity Systems intl"
"wuy","Redflag"
"lijian","Redflag"
"liutao","Redflag"
"lixxing","IBM"
"jiamingfei","IBM"
as some examples - clearly there are also a huge number of Sun people -
again giving the lie to the fact that Sun needs a guarenteed seat of
it's own [ with any fair voting system it would have a majority
clearly ].
So - what I propose is: we use this (crude admittedly) list to seed a
membership process for developers. We have a dedicated block of votes
for people doing hard-core, measurable coding: and we have a different
process for the rest of the seats to suit: if the Project Lead role
works well for NLC eg. so be it, I have no insight into that.
How does that sound ? it should be easy enough to round up a
non-partisan membership committee, and write some brief notes in the
normal way on how to manage that.
HTH,
Michael.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
"ab","Sun"
"af","Sun"
"akhva","Sun"
"ama","Sun"
"as","Sun"
"aw","Sun"
"bc","Sun"
"b_michaelsen","Sun"
"bm","Sun"
"cd","Sun"
"cl","Sun"
"cmc","RedHat"
"cn","Sun"
"dr","Sun"
"dv","Sun"
"erack","Sun"
"ericb","unaffiliated"
"er","Sun"
"fheckl","unaffiliated"
"fme","Sun"
"fne","Sun"
"fridrich_strba","Novell"
"fs","Sun"
"hbrinkm","Sun"
"hdu","Sun"
"hro","Sun"
"hr","Sun"
"hub","Novell"
"iha","Sun"
"is","Sun"
"jbu","Sun"
"jcn","Novell"
"jiamingfei","IBM"
"jl","Sun"
"jsc","Sun"
"ka","Sun"
"kendy","Novell"
"khong","Sun"
"kohei","Novell"
"kso","Sun"
"kz","Sun"
"lijian","Redflag"
"liutao","Redflag"
"lixxing","IBM"
"lla","Sun"
"mav","Sun"
"mba","Sun"
"mod","unaffiliated"
"mox","unaffiliated"
"mst","Sun"
"nemeth","unaffiliated"
"nn","Sun"
"npower","Novell"
"np","Sun"
"obo","Sun"
"obr","Sun"
"od","Sun"
"oj","Sun"
"os","Sun"
"pb","Sun"
"pflin","Novell"
"pl","Sun"
"rene","Debian"
"sb","Sun"
"sj","Sun"
"sus","Sun"
"tbe","Sun"
"thb","Novell"
"thb","Sun"
"timseves","SIL"
"tkr","Sun"
"tl","Sun"
"tmorgner","Pentaho"
"tra","Sun"
"wuy","Redflag"
"ydario","Serenity Systems intl"
"zhaojianwei","Redflag"
"gh","Sun"
"ihi","Sun"
"rt","Sun"
"vg","Sun"
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