Hello.
Recently Richard and I re-watched the wonderfully eighties movie,
Brewster's Millions. In this ode to money, Montgomery Brewster, thinking
that all the candidates for Mayor are slime, decides to squander a fortune
on running a "None of the above" campaign. In London.pm we're luckily
enough not to have to do this; I think that any of the candidates would
make an excellent job of being leader. (This is handy - I don't have a
spare $30 million to hand.)
So, you ask, if this isn't about who's competent to be leader, and it's
not about a personality contest, what is it about? Well, it's about what
people want to do with the role, and what they think the role should be
for. Rather than any one issue, I'd like to stand on what *I* think a
leader should do.
I think, that the primary role of the leader is to try, having heard
opinions, make decisions for the group that best serves the members of the
group.
Oh that sounds so easy. Of course, it's more complicated than that.
There's the fact that the decisions have to be timely (it's like
deflecting an asteroid, the earlier you do it the less effort it takes.)
Then the decisions have to be fair to all members of the group (not just
those that are being most vocal.) And they have to reflect the long term
direction of the group. I have endless appreciation of the great job Dave
Cross ensuring that the things he did, and the group did, were (where
possible) inclusive to all members of the group - something I would be
humbled to achieve myself.
So my proposed manifesto is simply this: I promise to listen to the
members of the group, and having listened, make a decision that considers
all the facts. Put that simply, I can promise to do nothing else.
Maybe I should, lest I be accused of sitting on the fence on all the
issues, actual explain how I'd put the above into practise.
Take for an example, the current discussion of the Calthrope Arms as our
reoccurring social meeting venue. Suppose for a second that we stipulate
that the Calthrope is the best pub that we can find. However, there
still exist a few people who, for whatever reason, are unable to turn up at
a meeting there. Should the whole group be force to move, or should the
few people be caused to suffer?
It's exactly in cases like these that a leader is needed (though to be
perfectly honest I prefer the term 'organiser' or at least 'head cat
herder.') You see, there are no right and wrong answers to these
questions, there as just compromises... and groups don't tend to be able to
make such a decision en-masse very easily.
I think we've been at the Calthrope too long - while it was right at the
time to put the needs of a few aside for the general good, to continue to
do so at the annoyance of the same members is unfair. It's not inclusive
you see... We should compromise by moving to another pub - or indeed back
to previous pubs - until we've at least annoyed some other people too much
;-).
I'm not going to go on about every issue here, that would simply take too
long. If anyone has any questions I'm more than happy to answer them,
either publicly or privately.
As I said to Paul, I'm happy enough to do the job if people think I
should. I think that should be enough.
Mark.
Bonus Material
As Brian D Foy says, don't chunk out the stuff you cut out, stick it at
the end as bonus material...
What have you got to do with London.pm? Um, long term member and it seems
current technical meeting minion. These facts are not really important,
as a) I'm not sure how long termed-ness qualifies one, b) my opponents have
been doing it longer than me and c) They've also held organisational roles
in London.pm before.
What have I got to do with Perl? A reasonable bit - In my spare time I
like to play with Template Toolkit, Testing, XML, Inline and The Perl
Advent Calender (currently eating all my spare time,) and I have the
CPANID of MARKF. Again, this isn't important as this this isn't a contest
in who can hack perl/Perl the best (thank goodness, see DCANTRELL and
RCLAMP for my competition.)
What I think we should be doing more of? Oh, many things to help Perl
programmers. Code review sessions for a start (ooh, and documentation
review sessions too.) Mentoring. Covering more things that interest Perl
programmers that arn't necessarily Perl (Unix, other languages, etc...more
joint things with the Linux/BSD people as well.) Micro case studies
(think lightning talks via email) Lots of ideas, which I realised aren't
really important either as I'll still help to do this if I'm elected or
not.
--
s'' Mark Fowler London.pm Bath.pm
http://www.twoshortplanks.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
';use Term'Cap;$t=Tgetent Term'Cap{};print$t->Tputs(cl);for$w(split/ +/
){for(0..30){$|=print$t->Tgoto(cm,$_,$y)." $w";select$k,$k,$k,.03}$y+=2}
