Hi Donnie, On 8/24/06, Donnie Berkholz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I started my fourth year as a Gentoo developer in June, and Gentoo's changed a lot since I started back in 2003. We've become a drastically more democratic organization. But the question remains — _Is this a good thing?_
Oh yes. It corrected major inbalances, and added significant credibility to our claim to be a community-based distro.
When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on pretty much whatever they feel like.
We've had a global vision for where Gentoo is going from before I joined - Gentoo is here to create a source-based distribution where each package is as close to what $UPSTREAM intended it to be as possible. We're not trying to take $UPSTREAM packages and innovate with them - we're here to do a first class job of packaging them up. It's a somewhat Daoist approach, and as such is completely alien to most Western thinking (which is based around modelling the world to our thoughts, instead of modelling ourselves to our world). Don't be afraid of it. In business terms, it's out "sweet spot" - it's the place we occupy that our more commercial competitors simply can't make in-roads on. It gives us a unique identity. "Everyone just working on pretty much what they feel like" is Gentoo's other major strength. What we work on is what is important to us. We work on what we need, and what we're motivated to do. Do you know how many companies wish they could say the same about their workforces? The flip side is that it's important we have a diverse and changing developer team. Our strength is also our weakness. If you get too much of an inbalance in the profiles and interests of the developers, you'll end up with a distro that's equally inbalanced. And it will be that which eventually kills off Gentoo. For example, if the work and decision making was dominated mainly by students or research academics - folks it could be said have no experience or understanding of the demands of the corporate workplace - eventually Gentoo would warp and turn into something that was too eclectic to fit in corporates. And the same is equally true the other way around.
When I joined, Daniel Robbins was in charge, period. Seemant Kulleen and Jon Portnoy were basically his lieutenants. What Daniel said was what happened, and woe to anyone who angered him. This generally worked out pretty well, but _as Gentoo grew, it didn't scale_. Everything significant still had to go through Daniel for personal approval.
Scaling wasn't the only issue. There were too many topics - especially when it came to servers and web-related issues - that were just beyond Daniel's experience and understanding. You also left Kurt out as one of the lieutenants.
Shortly after I finished training and became an "official" developer, Gentoo gained its first real structure via Gentoo Linux Enhancement Proposal (GLEP) 4 — "Gentoo top-level management structure proposal". The GLEP process itself was quite new then; GLEP 4 was really only the second proposed GLEP (the first two were details related to the GLEP process) and the first one that was accepted. _Its goal was to improve communication and coordination as well as increase accountability_. GLEP 4 formalized a hierarchy of so-called "top-level" projects — between 5 and 10 major areas into which everything in Gentoo could be divided. Daniel appointed the original project managers, who served under him.
That hierarchy was always flawed. Server-related matters never had a seat at the top table, and ended up being represented by the base systems manager. That actually turned out quite well for us, because folks simply left us alone to get on with things.
Democratic elections entered Gentoo when we realized that we needed to create a new top-level project for all the desktop work, because it didn't fit into any existing project. Since managers already voted amongst themselves on GLEPs, it seemed like a natural extension for them to vote on a new manager. The call for nominations is archived online. I'd been a developer for around six months at this point, and by then I was the lead X maintainer. Brandon Hale was active in maintaining window managers and other miscellaneous applets and such. Turns out that the vote tied, so we became co-managers. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of a very slippery slope. Gentoo used to be a courteous, friendly development community where nobody was afraid to speak his mind for fear of insult and injury. I see a clear correlation between the growth in democracy and the departure of courtesy. Once people are empowered to vote on every decision, rather than just having their discussion taken as input in a decision, they get a lot more vehement, argumentative and forceful about getting their way. _Flamewars and loud arguments going on for hundreds of posts have become commonplace, despite the occasional outcry_.
Except ... even today, folks simply aren't empowered to vote on every decision (other than by voting with their feet). Your hypothesis seems to be based on a flawed model of how Gentoo works, I'm afraid.
Here's one such outcry, on March 20, 2006, to the private developers' list: What I've seen for the last 18 months or more is a general degeneration in the attitudes of developers for their fellow developers. When I joined, the attitude of people was friendly and welcoming. I screwed up a couple of times. I didn't get my ass handed to me. I got picked up, and comforted. And taught and tutored. ... So, we split from the Gentoo Technologies company, to a community owned Gentoo Foundation. And now everyone was empowered. Everyone has a voice. Some louder than others. The unfortunate thing is that with this empowerment came a bit of assholishness. With rare exception, we're pretty much all guilty of that. Someone makes a spelling error in a commit, and that leads to flamefests on irc and mailing lists and blog entries. And so on, ad nauseum. Frankly, I'm sick of it. It's burning people out. We're burning ourselves out by being this way. It's time to stop this shit. To everyone reading this, you've arrived at the important bit. From now, please try this little thing. When you're on the mailing lists or the fora or irc channels or in /query or somehow in the gentoo 'verse, please try, just try, to be a little bit nicer to the people with whom you're interacting. That's all. Have a little respect (even if not deserved!). Listen a little. Hold back the snide comment, the sarcastic remark. I don't mean to get all Oprah on you all, but I hope you see my point -- just be nice for a change.
The vocal minority often gets its way, despite 99% of the other developers being happy with any given situation.
This is hardly a new phenomenon invented by Gentoo. You'll find tonnes about this under topics such as "growing pains", and also "management by ego". The basic cause always comes down to weak or non-existent management. Your very best folks are good because (rightly or wrongly) they fill perceived vaccuums. They wander out of their own areas because they genuinely care, and they see a situation where they feel they can help out more junior folks. When these wanderers get there, they can be characterised as having one of two agendas. They either absorb the agenda of the folks they've gone to help, and they do their best to make that happen. Or - and sadly this is the case with certain vocal folks in Gentoo - they instead seek to impose their pre-conceived ideas and their agenda on the folks that they've gone to help. Although the motives are sound - they genuinely care - the whole imposing just gets folks backs up, and is often made worse by poor personal communication skills (made worse by our reliance on electronic communications) and by the fact that many of the people acting like this frankly aren't good enough to bring the right ideas across. This whole thing is often described as management by ego, and arises primarily because there's no effective structure to contain these wanders, and ensure that they fuck off when they overstep the mark.
The problem got so bad that our Developer Relations team wrote up an etiquette guide. Unsurprisingly, the same vocal minority that generally behaves like an ass and violates said etiquette guide erupted in flames over it, and it ended up fading into an existing but largely irrelevant piece of writing.
That's true, but again it's not the whole story. The original complaints against the etiquette guide (even from the vocal minority) were rightly about the way this was done. No offense to Deedra and Tim, but the whole process of writing and introducing that guide should be held up for time immemorial as an example of how not to work with a volunteer community.
Around the same time, more cries of "Democracy!" and "Eliminate the cabal!" forced developer relations (devrel) to come up with a huge, bureaucratic, court-like system for disciplining pretty much the same group of people again.
That's not how I remember it. The court-like system was a direct consequence to the way that Ciaran's first suspension was handled. Plenty of folks felt that the way it was done left a very bad taste in the mouth, and the system that followed was an attempt to address those genuine problems.
Everyone treated it like a world of extremes of good and evil, where democracy is absolutely good and purity, and anything other than that is evil. This added bureaucracy has essentially rendered this side of devrel powerless, meaningless and useless.
I'm not sure how you can justify that statement. To the best of my knowledge, that system has only been tested in full the once - when Brian was suspended from the project and Ciaran was expelled.
All in all, the vocal minority has done a splendid job of becoming more influential, crippling Gentoo's ability to do anything at all about its members, their flames, their outstanding work at ruining people's fun and enjoyment of Gentoo, and their waste of everyone else's time.
Can you back this up with three examples in the last twelve months where this has happened?
How can we do anything about this?
You start at the beginning, which is recruitment. Many companies and organisations are guilty of looking at recruitment simply at the superficial level - that it's purpose is to increase head-count, to put bums on seats, and to make sure that there are enough shoulders to share the load. That is something that has to be taken into account, but it ignores the fundamentals. The fundamentals of recruitment are about enlargening your internal community (ie, your workforce, or in our case, our army of volunteer developers). It's about bringing people in so that they accept and respect what your community is, how it works, and why. You actively mentor them, because it takes an average of six months for a new recruit to "get it". You set things up so that they are automatically out the door unless they "get it". "Getting it" isn't just about the technical aspect of the work. The social side is *just* as important - but unfortunately, that's a difficult thing for the kind of volunteers we attract to understand or accept (as any IT manager can attest to ;) Your internal community needs a shared culture. When the shit hits the fan, it's that shared culture which holds everything together until you pull through. Our problem is that we have a critical mass of groups who do not share a culture to bind them together, and drive them to overcome their differences.
As people such as Mike Auty have pointed out, the problem could be with the increasing barrage of rules, regulations and policies to which we're expected to adhere. Take a look at the FreeBSD committers' rules. Rule one is "Respect other committers," and rule two is "Respect other contributors." Take a look at the importance of courtesy and care to avoid creating long-term disagreements in rule one: Being able to work together long term is this project's greatest asset, one far more important than any set of changes to the code, and turning arguments about code into issues that affect our long-term ability to work harmoniously together is just not worth the trade-off by any conceivable stretch of the imagination. ... First calm down, then think about how to communicate in the most effective fashion for convincing the other person(s) that your side of the argument is correct, do not just blow off some steam so you can feel better in the short term at the cost of a long-term flame war. Not only is this very bad "energy economics", but repeated displays of public aggression which impair our ability to work well together will be dealt with severely by the project leadership and may result in suspension or termination of your commit privileges.
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Or how about the Ubuntu Code of Conduct? The first two rules are "Be considerate" and "Be respectful." Again, note that these rules are actually enforced. As has been pointed out on the Gentoo development list, you can have respect without courtesy. But Gentoo needs both! One just isn't good enough.
These are good points.
But what about Gentoo? We don't have any overriding principles like this from which all of the standards for behavior derive. Instead, we have a large document explaining specifically and in detail what's allowed and what isn't, and even that is ignored. Because of the bureaucracy and the lack of respect for devrel's role, we're effectively powerless to do anything when people behave in a way for which the FreeBSD project's leadership would kick them to the curb.
Hrm. Where is this lack of respect for devrel being displayed today? What forms does this lack of respect take? If there's a lack of respect at the moment, it's not for devrel. It's between individual developers, who either do not value each other as people, or do not value each other as contributors. A good way to sort that out is to get them together in the physical world, and use group de-polarisation exercises to help folks understand that their view of the world isn't the only view that is valid. This is why I'm hoping to see Gentoo establish a regular international dev conference. You'll find that the vast majority of issues won't arise once folks actually know each other better - and the personality clashes that are left are easier to see for what they are. (You can't eliminate all personality clashes, alas.) And, we've already proved that we _can_ (eventually) deal with the tiny minority of genuine trouble makers who are left over. Children create relationships based on friendship. It's an adult behaviour to create relationships based on trust. In the main, the vocal minority that you refer to several times here can be characterised as acting like the former, rather than the later. I'd also argue that we're _not_ powerless. It wasn't pleasant, but the old system has shown that we can deal with genuine trouble makers. But you can't have everyone get along with everyone else, either - not in a enlargening community. A larger group needs that diversity in order to survive, and to flourish. No offense to the FreeBSD world, but I'd rather be a part of the larger Linux world - with a larger, but not always 100% harmonious community - than part of the smaller FreeBSD world.
I'm not the only one to suggest that a democracy isn't the most productive way to run Gentoo. When people wanted to change in how Gentoo was run, democracy was the only option considered, rather than simply changing the leaders. There's an ongoing assumption that if problems exist, it must be somewhere in the structure rather than in the people.
We don't have a democracy. Gentoo is largely a workocracy (there must be a better word for it ;), where the vast majority decisions are made by the folks who actually do the work. Folks don't vote on stuff. To pick a recent example, none of the folks who opposed Sunrise actually had any means to vote to prevent it happening. What they had to do was to lobby the council, who were the only folks with a vote. If we had actually tried a democracy (something I'm instinctively against, but rationally am becoming more and more interested in), your arguments would maybe carry some weight. But, the clear fact of the matter is that we haven't - and that leaves your arguments built on sand.
If I could go back in time a couple of years and prevent this democracy from ever happening, I would. If I could fix these problems myself, I would. But it requires buy-in from the entire Gentoo community if we're to do anything about it.
I'm naturally suspicious of anyone who seeks office on a platform of talking about the need to beef up the powers of an unelected body (ie devrel), and who does so using at best a partial playback of how we got to where we are today, with arguments that are built on a demonstrably flawed understanding of where we are today. You've just lost my vote. I'm not standing for election, but maybe someone who is would be interested in investigating some ideas Sejo discussed with me when he left us. The summary is my own; hopefully I've captured Sejo's ideas accurately. * Every staff member has to belong to a team. You join a team by being voted onto the team by the other members of the team. They don't vote you in, you can't join. * If you're not part of any team, your rights and privileges as a staff member are automatically terminated. There's no place to go to appeal. * You can be voted off the team at any time. The teams are self-managing. I've heard of businesses having tried out similar schemes like this, with strong success, but it's not an approach I've seen first hand, or read much about. I'd be very interested in exploring this one more. Best regards, Stu -- PS: Isn't it fascinating how different folks can live through the same events, but end up with different perspectives on it? :) -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
