On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 5:07 PM, David Bruant <[email protected]> wrote: > The hiring process, for various reasons cannot > be considered as a meritocracy, so Mozilla is not really a meritocracy.
The hiring process could be construed to be a merit portability mechanism where the candidate demonstrates merit elsewhere and then Mozilla-the-HR-entity ports that merit to the Mozilla community by hiring the person into a decision-making role. I think that's stretching the meaning of meritocracy, though. If you tell people that a project is a meritocracy, they will rightly assume that it means that the people who decide are people who have demonstrated merit *in the context of* the project. I think Mozilla would give a more truthful picture of its decision making if it didn't describe itself as a meritocracy. (I think stopping porting merit by the means of hiring would not be a reasonable way to resolve the conflict between the actual practice and the "meritocracy" description. To be clear: I don't have problems with decisions made by people who were hired from outside the community directly into decision-making roles and who hadn't had time to have gained Mozilla-contextual merit by the time of the decision.) -- Henri Sivonen [email protected] http://hsivonen.iki.fi/ _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
