Your initial goal with the poll was to prevent embezzlement of the funds. No, it was to choose priorities in a fair democratized way, as opposed to a small number of people making all the decisions in a chat room that most people aren't part of (which resulted in what appears to be either stagnation of our userbase or a loss of users depending on how you count it). There are some tough administrative decisions remaining to make about stage 3, namely which voters to exclude from stage 3 because they look like a sybil attack. I really don't understand how this could have been such a roadblock. If there is obvious abuse then we just ignore that feedback. Why is this so hard? It seems like you're looking for reasons to declare a democratic process is a failure. Ian, you need to accept the fact that you don't have the time to be the sole person to steer this project. I agree, and I have agreed many times - the problem isn't that I'm clinging on to "power", the problem is the lack of someone with the enthusiasm, vision, and ability to take over coordination of the project, or at least to share this responsibility and push things forward. If I have overlooked anyone suitable raising their hand then please let me know. We act as the grown up engineers we are and accept the fact that our experiment of a new approach, while being nice in theory, has failed - while the old one had produced over 3000 commits [1] over two years which *are* deployed *and* being usable by our users. Counting commits is a terrible way to measure progress. Progress should be measured in terms of whether we're rolling out features and fixing bugs that help us acquire new users and keep the ones we already have. we conclude that we maybeshould just revert to the old approach as it has at least been producingworking results. Has it? Then why have we been losing users? Why have we had to put up with an embarrassment of a website? What are the major user-facing features that have been rolled out over the past 2 years? What has the project done to attract attention? The old approach is not a responsible way to deploy $25k. Ian. Ian Clarke Founder, The Freenet Project Email: [email protected]
On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 11:18 AM, [email protected] wrote: Ian, this is inevitably gonna be longer than the length of mails you prefer, BUT: Its *main* goal is to fix the issue of you having to reply to even more, longer mails in the first place. So please read it, PLEASE :) Really, PLEASE read it :) - Your initial goal with the poll was to prevent embezzlement of the funds. As a donor, you wouldn't care *HOW* the funds are embezzled, it only matters whether they are used or not. So not producing any significant result for 7 months is just the same as embezzlement, and thus the poll has *failed* at what you wanted. - Why did it fail? There are some tough administrative decisions remaining to make about stage 3, namely which voters to exclude from stage 3 because they look like a sybil attack. I *should not* make those decisions while my employment is not decided yet because making them myself could influence the results in a way which makes me more attractive to hire. Any other of our core contributors also cannot decide this because all of them participated in the poll except you and thus they all may be biased. So two months ago I mailed you a proposal what we could do there for you to make the final decision. I've reminded you various times, but you seem to be too busy to do this. Fair enough, we all have a life. But it leads us to another conclusion: - Ian, you need to accept the fact that you don't have the time to be the sole person to steer this project. This is NOT an offense to you as a person. I fully accept that you're probably just so good and successful as an entrepreneur that your new startup absorbs all your time. That's completely acceptable! We just need to draw conclusions from it. This doesn't mean you have to *give up* your privileges, you just have to copy some to someone else so they can move things forward. - I propose we do one of the following: 1. We act as the grown up engineers we are and accept the fact that our experiment of a new approach, while being nice in theory, has failed - while the old one had produced over 3000 commits [1] over two years which *are* deployed *and* being usable by our users. So being bound to scientifically sane behavior we conclude that we maybe should just revert to the old approach as it has at least been producing working results. So, yes, I'll throw the first stone: Let me continue doing my job as before. I would just focus on writing code so things keep moving. This WILL still imply that there will be polls and discussions: - I *HAVE* always been working towards the goal of an existing poll already anyway, and it actually had at least 4700 % more voters: Our uservoice poll [2]. The winning vote of filesharing won't be possible without something like WoT, so that's why WoT has been my focus. The poll just wasn't being a blocker to engineer's commonsense, veto decisions were still being made where they looked reasonable. - I *will* also take the results of this poll into consideration, just in a less blocking, mandatory, overengineered-for-our-manpower way. A lot of it such as darknet usability enhancements / installer fixes could be done as part of the "1 day per week for technical debt" which was included in the poll and which I strongly support. - The standard procedure *was* and *will be* to have a daily progress report on IRC about what I did today and what I will do tomorrow. The team *has had* and *will have* the opportunity to discuss the plans *and* influence them. So if you say the magical words "Yes, continue your job please" then I can start to churn out actual code right now and we can at least produce something. Still better than doing nothing like we're doing now. I'm aware that at least nextgens may be opposed to hiring me again, which is why I have done a special thing to say sorry for previous disagreements: I've been doing my best to try to voluntarily write some WoT code for *every* day of the past months. Check the logs of #freenet where the GitHub bot announced my commits. I would be very happy if you could accept that as a "I'm sorry" and allow us to set aside our differences and move on. I thought producing something which is of use to the community would be the best way to say sorry. I hope it also shows you that I really don't care about just grabbing the money, this was a *lot* of volunteer work to do. I care about this project and I want it to succeed, more than I care about my personal finances which I have stressed *a lot* by not having a real job for 1 year now just so I can stay available for Freenet. I will continue writing code even if I am not hired, just less, so you may decide very freely. 2. If you don't want us to continue as before, I'm OK if you consider this merely as another reminder about my stage 3 questions. Answer them and I will finish the poll results ASAP. I just want to get things moving, don't care how. I'd also encourage people besides Ian to voice whether they're for 1 or 2, our big problem is months of not deciding anything so any "yes/no" feedback is a good idea here as it helps reaching a decision finally. Greetings, xor [1] WoT builds 13 to 18, fred plugin-fcp-rewrite. [2] https://freenet.uservoice.com Number of participants assumed to be the lower boundary of votes for the winner: 716 Number of participants in our current poll: 15 Ian Clarke Founder, The Freenet Project Email: [email protected] _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [email protected] https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
