[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto wrote: I have a few ideas about this that I'll have to put in writing and share later, but let me start by proposing that for such a change we require the support of at least 2/3 of the devs that vote *and* a minimum of 1/3 of all devs. I'd use absolute majority even if it is more strict. lu -- Luca Barbato Gentoo Council Member Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
Luca Barbato wrote: Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto wrote: I have a few ideas about this that I'll have to put in writing and share later, but let me start by proposing that for such a change we require the support of at least 2/3 of the devs that vote *and* a minimum of 1/3 of all devs. I'd use absolute majority even if it is more strict. The only concern I have with these kinds of approaches is that right now we tend to be pretty liberal with allowing people to be devs even if they aren't heavily involved in gentoo. As long as their commits are of sufficient quality that isn't a big deal. However, it does allow the voting rolls to get pretty big with people that don't have a huge stake in the outcome of an election. Organizations that tend to have supermajority policies tend to have other kinds of requirements on dues or activity, and they also tend to routinely clean out their rolls. A supermajority policy might work fine if we also had a policy that a dev who fails to vote in two consecutive elections gets the boot. I'm not sure that we really want that kind of a policy, however. My feeling is that if you don't care enough to vote, you should have to live with the consequences. Now, all elections of any kind should be announced well in advance, and should span a period of a few weeks (as they currently do). If an issue is particularly critical and nobody can get around to voting for it in a 2 weeks span while there are hundreds of arguments raging in IRC and the lists, then I'm not sure we can take their silence as a vote of disapproval.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
Doug Goldstein wrote: On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 9:33 PM, Ned Luddso...@gentoo.org wrote: Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings. The reason for this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit, technical and social. Thank you again. I tried the +m/+v thing a year ago and received a few pieces of hate e-mail from mostly non-developer people. Please do go to +m. I usually just read council summaries - when I've tried to read the actual logs it is a COMPLETE mess. In most organizational board-like bodies the board meeting is NOT the place to have open discussion on topics. The open discussion happens everywhere BUT the board meeting. It happens on the phone, on mailing lists, in newspapers, on TV, on talk radio, etc. During the board meeting people who want to make a statement can do so within a limited amount of time, and then the board casts its vote. 95% of the time the way the vote will go is known before the meeting happens. The meeting is just a formality. If there is to be a 300 line argument over proposal-A vs proposal-B, do it on the mailing lists, or on IRC. Council votes should be straightforward matters. If we want to have more interaction - how about this idea: Formal council meetings happen once per month, and they are the ONLY place votes take place. However, the council will try to meet more often for less formal discussion. +m/+v may be imposed at any time if there is a large turnout just to keep things somewhat orderly. Attendance is not mandatory for these meetings, but is encouraged. You could also schedule them at a variety of times - again, you're not missing any votes so if only 1/3rd of the council makes any particular meeting it isn't a big deal. As far as having two council members temporarily approve items goes - it isn't a bad thing to have in general, but it should really only be used in emergency situations. I'm not sure if we even need it - I suspect that groups like infra will do the right thing most of the time if there is an emergency (dev starts committing rm -rf /* scripts all over the portage tree - infra suspends cvs access first and finds devrel later). Maybe a quick way to assess developer opinions on issues would be forum polls? The votify system is potentially good as well, but I'm not sure how much work it requires on the part of infra to gather/tally the votes. We really don't need the full rigor of votify for most issues (though it probably should be used if there are true referendums on serious matters). And, of course, there is always the measure the noise on the mailing list approach, but I'm not a big fan of that (though I am a fan of lists in general).
[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
There's a lot of good stuff to think about here. For what it's worth, some initial comments. On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 19:33 -0700, Ned Ludd wrote: The dev population is quite a strange beast. I never expected to win. Why would you vote for somebody who did not even publish a manifesto? I don't know but I love you for it. My only intention was to help offset dev-zero being able force the will of outside forces upon us. Well that has been accomplished for now (w00t). But I never ever expected to be ranked so high. /me blushes So that means you guys/gals expect stuff from me. Well as I never wrote a manifesto but you still voted for me, I guess I should share some of my ideas on what I'd like to see happen over the following year. The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote. But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive conversations without being labeled troll. We could provide for a recall vote, but I don't like that idea. Discussion in channel is ideal if there is some way/someone to help keep it civil enough to be useful. Another one of the things I'd like to see and help reform with the council. First off it spends way too much time on EAPI/PMS. There is no reason to make the council an extension of the portage team. Portage is still the official package manager of Gentoo. Granted it's good to accommodate others to an extent and I've always kept an open mind on other tools. Alternatives are good as there is always the right tool for the task at hand. But the council really should not be getting involved most of the time unless there is a conflict which can't be worked out among the masses and those trying to get portage to adopt new features. If the dev body wants it otherwise then I'd like to turn my vote over to you the devs. Each and every time the council wants/has to vote on an EAPI/PMS feature then I'll happily put my vote in your hands. You fire up that old votify system and use my vote as yours. Not a bad idea if votify is agile enough. Note however that zmedico is not in favor of his time being wasted on deciding what PMS/EAPI features are good. He simply likes bugs and solving those. He likes giving us new features and tends to be more in favor of the devs and community figuring out what is best for us. An EAPI review committee could work well also. As long as we could get non bias people in there. EAPI review committee --- please do. I agree that council meetings are not the place to do detail EAPI work. The council should be more about community vs technical issues only. We have lots of top level projects within Gentoo which have simply given up on the council as being an outlet to accomplish anything useful. It should be our job to look at the projects in Gentoo. Look at the ones that have a healthy community and encourage and promote them in ways. Agreed. For example prefix comes to mind. It was a project I did not like at first. I'm not even a user. And there are things I surely don't like about it as is. But there is community support and it's the icing on the cake for some. So I'll back the fsck up and give credit where it's due. This is a perfectly good example of a project/fork that needs to come back home. Perhaps it's time to cherry pick some more stuff/people out of Sunrise? desultory points out any two council members can decide to approve anything, and that decision is considered to be equivalent to a full council vote until the next meeting. I vaguely recall that rule. I'm not sure about you, but I think that is a little to much power to put in the hands of a few. Any dev mind if we dump that power? Dump it. Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings. The reason for this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit, technical and social. Probably a good idea. I don't much care for biweekly free-for-alls either. The reason the meetings should go back to monthly is to allow those who are council members in Gentoo to accomplish things other than the council only. We all have personal lives and we all have our respective roles we play outside of the council. Another note on meetings. The time they are held currently don't fit well with my work schedule. I'm not subscribed directly to the gentoo-dev mailing list anymore outside of post-only.
[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
Ned Ludd wrote: The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote. But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive conversations without being labeled troll. I'm not sure about that, but we can easily give it a try. What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to modify or change parts of glep 39. As it's the council's constitution somehow, we have two options from my pov (besides that a former council did decide the council itself can change it's rules): - a large majority (at least 5 out of 7) of council members needs to ack the change - changes to glep 39 require a vote with all developers participating and a large majority (2/3 or 3/4) needs to ack the suggested change Also I'd like to require commit messages to gleps (and especially glep 39) being useful and denote based on which decision by whom that change got made. For example the following commit message I'd consider quite useless (at least two or three years ago): Add the one person one vote clause to GLEP 39 as agreed. [1] Who did agree? Where is that noted down? ... and so on. An EAPI review committee could work well also. As long as we could get non bias people in there. I was thinking about that for quite some time and as long as we get some non-biased people in there we should try that as well. The council should be more about community vs technical issues only. We have lots of top level projects within Gentoo which have simply given up on the council as being an outlet to accomplish anything useful. It should be our job to look at the projects in Gentoo. Look at the ones that have a healthy community and encourage and promote them in ways. ack For example prefix comes to mind. It was a project I did not like at first. I'm not even a user. And there are things I surely don't like about it as is. But there is community support and it's the icing on the cake for some. So I'll back the fsck up and give credit where it's due. This is a perfectly good example of a project/fork that needs to come back home. Perhaps it's time to cherry pick some more stuff/people out of Sunrise? prefix is a really good example, yeah. Nearly noone knows it, but it's really cool to have for example a virtualized windows machine running on a linux host. The windows box then runs prefix in interix. Not that it's really useful at all (hey, it's slow as hell) - but it's very interesting that such things are possible and it's definitively an eyecatcher on expos. prefix is one of Gentoo's most underrated projects. As for Sunrise I do think that's what we already do - but: getting users more actively involved in Sunrise makes them happy, plus it's easier for us to recruit new developers. Therefore: push Sunrise! I very much disliked how the Sunrise project has been started some years ago, but in the end we do need to integrate it a tad better to make it even more useful for both users and developers. desultory points out any two council members can decide to approve anything, and that decision is considered to be equivalent to a full council vote until the next meeting. I vaguely recall that rule. I'm not sure about you, but I think that is a little to much power to put in the hands of a few. Any dev mind if we dump that power? It's quite much power in quite a few hands, but in the end that's some kind of last resort rule. All council members should be smart enough (and i do consider all of us being smart enough) to know when that last resort becomes active. Therefore I think it doesn't hurt to have such a rule in place. Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings. The reason for this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit, technical and social. The reason the meetings should go back to monthly is to allow those who are council members in Gentoo to accomplish things other than the council only. We all have personal lives and we all have our respective roles we play outside of the council. Another note on meetings. The time they are held currently don't fit well with my work schedule. I'm all for going back to monthly meetings and make them a tad more organized. As I summarized in the last few minutes of our last council meeting - we do have rules in place to keep our meetings organized, we just need to follow them. As for meeting times we can (that was
[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Tobias Scherbaumdertobi...@gentoo.org wrote: Ned Ludd wrote: The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote. But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive conversations without being labeled troll. I'm not sure about that, but we can easily give it a try. What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to modify or change parts of glep 39. As it's the council's constitution somehow, we have two options from my pov (besides that a former council did decide the council itself can change it's rules): - a large majority (at least 5 out of 7) of council members needs to ack the change - changes to glep 39 require a vote with all developers participating and a large majority (2/3 or 3/4) needs to ack the suggested change Just FYI, Gentoo is lucky if 1/2 of the devs vote; so I assume here you mean large majority of the people who actually voted. Also I'd like to require commit messages to gleps (and especially glep 39) being useful and denote based on which decision by whom that change got made. For example the following commit message I'd consider quite useless (at least two or three years ago): Add the one person one vote clause to GLEP 39 as agreed. [1] Who did agree? Where is that noted down? ... and so on. An EAPI review committee could work well also. As long as we could get non bias people in there. I was thinking about that for quite some time and as long as we get some non-biased people in there we should try that as well. The council should be more about community vs technical issues only. We have lots of top level projects within Gentoo which have simply given up on the council as being an outlet to accomplish anything useful. It should be our job to look at the projects in Gentoo. Look at the ones that have a healthy community and encourage and promote them in ways. ack For example prefix comes to mind. It was a project I did not like at first. I'm not even a user. And there are things I surely don't like about it as is. But there is community support and it's the icing on the cake for some. So I'll back the fsck up and give credit where it's due. This is a perfectly good example of a project/fork that needs to come back home. Perhaps it's time to cherry pick some more stuff/people out of Sunrise? prefix is a really good example, yeah. Nearly noone knows it, but it's really cool to have for example a virtualized windows machine running on a linux host. The windows box then runs prefix in interix. Not that it's really useful at all (hey, it's slow as hell) - but it's very interesting that such things are possible and it's definitively an eyecatcher on expos. prefix is one of Gentoo's most underrated projects. As for Sunrise I do think that's what we already do - but: getting users more actively involved in Sunrise makes them happy, plus it's easier for us to recruit new developers. Therefore: push Sunrise! I very much disliked how the Sunrise project has been started some years ago, but in the end we do need to integrate it a tad better to make it even more useful for both users and developers. desultory points out any two council members can decide to approve anything, and that decision is considered to be equivalent to a full council vote until the next meeting. I vaguely recall that rule. I'm not sure about you, but I think that is a little to much power to put in the hands of a few. Any dev mind if we dump that power? It's quite much power in quite a few hands, but in the end that's some kind of last resort rule. All council members should be smart enough (and i do consider all of us being smart enough) to know when that last resort becomes active. Therefore I think it doesn't hurt to have such a rule in place. Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings. The reason for this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit, technical and social. The reason the meetings should go back to monthly is to allow those who are council members in Gentoo to accomplish things other than the council only. We all have personal lives and we all have our respective roles we play outside of the council. Another note on meetings. The time they are held currently don't fit well with my work schedule. I'm all for going back to monthly meetings and
[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
Alec Warner wrote: What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to modify or change parts of glep 39. As it's the council's constitution somehow, we have two options from my pov (besides that a former council did decide the council itself can change it's rules): - a large majority (at least 5 out of 7) of council members needs to ack the change - changes to glep 39 require a vote with all developers participating and a large majority (2/3 or 3/4) needs to ack the suggested change Just FYI, Gentoo is lucky if 1/2 of the devs vote; so I assume here you mean large majority of the people who actually voted. Uhrm, yeah ... of course. - Tobias signature.asc Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil
[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
On Thursday 02 July 2009 10:54:05 Tobias Scherbaum wrote: Ned Ludd wrote: The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote. But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive conversations without being labeled troll. I'm not sure about that, but we can easily give it a try. What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to modify or change parts of glep 39. we already have a formal method: - change is proposed ahead of time like any other business for council to review (which means the community sees it) - council votes and assuming it passed - the dev/council lists are notified of changes (see previous summaries for example) - if there is still no problems, then the project page/GLEP is amended officially if the dev community has a problem, then it should have come up like any other issue along the way. if the only way to resolve the greater dev concerns is with a vote, then that is how it goes. needing a full community vote all the time is a huge time waste for absolutely no gain. -mike signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
I'll have things to say about this but I'm still in the woods with dialup until monday. So either I can get close to a fatter pipe later today or tomorrow, or I'll do it on monday night from home. Denis.
[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?
Tobias Scherbaum wrote: Alec Warner wrote: What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to modify or change parts of glep 39. As it's the council's constitution somehow, we have two options from my pov (besides that a former council did decide the council itself can change it's rules): - a large majority (at least 5 out of 7) of council members needs to ack the change - changes to glep 39 require a vote with all developers participating and a large majority (2/3 or 3/4) needs to ack the suggested change Just FYI, Gentoo is lucky if 1/2 of the devs vote; so I assume here you mean large majority of the people who actually voted. Uhrm, yeah ... of course. I have a few ideas about this that I'll have to put in writing and share later, but let me start by proposing that for such a change we require the support of at least 2/3 of the devs that vote *and* a minimum of 1/3 of all devs. By requiring the support of at least 1/3 of all devs, we can ensure that it won't be possible to have extreme events as getting a policy change approved by 90% of the voting devs which happen to represent 10% of all devs. OTOH, requiring 2/3 of the voting devs might prove to be to hard in an election with a high turnout - afaicr we didn't have 60% turnout in any election in at least the last 2 years. - Tobias -- Regards, Jorge Vicetto (jmbsvicetto) - jmbsvicetto at gentoo dot org Gentoo- forums / Userrel / Devrel / SPARC / KDE
