Hey all, Having downloaded the tally sheet [0], and verified by magic token that at least my vote seems to have been counted correctly, and gotten the same results the project secretary got both using the official vote counting method and a couple of others [1], it looks like I better be writing an acceptance mail...
So, first, thanks to all the folks who've offered congratulations (I don't think my IRC screen has ever been so full of highlights) and the insightful few who offered their commiserations as well; and thanks to everyone who participated in the election, whether by standing for DPL, by putting your name up for one of the DPL teams or otherwise offering to help whoever's elected, by voting, by participating in the discussions on -vote, Planet or IRC, or by helping coordinate or organise the election and debates. A particular shout out to Manoj, who's not only set an excellent standard for ensuring our election process is efficient, transparent and reliable, but raised it every year. Before I start replying to the couple of inquiries from press people, I thought it'd be sensible to put a few initial thoughts to y'all via this list... The general philosophy I'm aiming to follow is that the DPL's not really anything innately special -- there's very little you can do as DPL that you can't do as a regular developer, or even as an excited maintainer. What is different is the level of expectation: people pay more attention to the DPL than J. Random Developer, are more inclined to turn to the DPL when something's needed, and have a list of things from the campaign period they expect the DPL to follow through on... And all that is... well, rather daunting to say the least. Mitigating that, though, is one of Debian's major strengths: namely its diversity. I used to walk past what I guess was an AWU Queensland office, emblazoned with the motto "Unity is Strength" [2] -- and it always struck me how different that was to Debian, which draws its strength from the cacophony of different voices and ideas from all over the planet. GPL, BSD; DFSG, non-free; Gnome, KDE, ion, virtual consoles; zsh, tcsh; sendmail, postfix; nvi, vim; emacs, xemacs; stable, unstable... By dealing with diversity, we improve Debian multiplicatively instead of just additively, but more importantly, by being so diverse, we ensure it's not the end of the world if any of us fall or fail, but that the project will continue with barely a hiccup. So if you're one of the 17% or so of voters who would've rathered rerun the election than have me win it, or are otherwise disappointed in the result, I'd encourage you to spend a little bit of time thinking over your options, and in particular to realise that, no matter what happens, you always have the option of ignoring it -- the constitution absolutely guarantees you can't be forced to do anything you disapprove of. The worst case is presumably that you spend time improving some localised area of Debian, or focus on an upstream project, or a derived distro, or an alternate distro -- and as long as you keep working on free software, you're likely to continue benefiting from Debian's work, and Debian's likely to continue benefiting from yours -- all of which is still absolutely a good thing. So don't be afraid to act (or not act) according to your conscience: at worst, even if I'm wrong and Debian somehow ends up not diverse enough for you, the broader Debian community, and the free software community at large, definitely is and will remain so. Of course, the real challenge is for all the folks who thought I'd be a good DPL to ensure that in twelve months time we don't have to avoid eye contact with that 17% and listen to the "I told you so"'s... Fortunately that problem isn't quite here yet, so the details for that can wait a few days at least. :) In the meantime, Branden's term's still got a week left, during which we'll hopefully be able to add amd64 to etch, get the second point release of sarge out, possibly get modular X into unstable, and [_whatever you want to add here_]. So let's get on with it! Cheers, aj [0] $ lynx -source http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_002_tally.txt | sha1sum 955c447b11216efc6aed84b3e4eeeb834f1d602f - [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/04/msg00036.html [2] http://www.awu.org.au/index.php
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