On Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:24:19 +0100 Ian Lynch increased personal carbon footprint by exciting electrons the world over with these memorable words:
> On Mon, 2008-08-11 at 21:48 +0100, Michael Meeks wrote: > > > > 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 ;-) > > In fact, I can think of at least one instance where the project lead > was removed pretty well unilaterally by the Community Manager (not an > elected position and the one with arguably the most power). One of the > reasons I am a lot less active in the OpenOffice.org community than I > was in the past is simply that the whole thing lacks any real > democratic organisation. The person with the most power in the > community is not elected and the normal company rules for such a > situation don't apply. At one time it appeared that if anyone > challenged the views of the Community Manager they were considered a > disruptive influence and marginalised asap. One Marcon was sacked > without any due process. Whether or not this was justified is not the > issue, the point is that there was no transparent disciplinary process > and no democratic basis. Certainly if that had happened in a company > in any established democracy the company would have lost an unfair > dismissal action. It seems volunteers are expendable. > > Even if this sort of thing was rare, the fact that it can happen shows > that something is broken. So to me, there is not much point in > fiddling around with the balance of code contributors vs project leads > when the fundamental power lies with neither group and is unelected. > This type of thing (dictatorial actions) sounds related to what caused the split from Mambo to create Joomla! a while back. The situation is not at all identical - but the similarities, and depth of feeling do ring the same to me. Still the Joomla! team have not had an easy time of it either since. They were focusing on new software and were very reluctant to provide updates for the old version until they were told the consequences. -- Michael All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well - Julian of Norwich 1342 - 1416 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
