So I think one of the assumptions you're making is that it's good to agree on priorities.
I think I disagree with that assumption. I think we do need to have agreement on the high-level goals of the project, but I think it's actually good to disagree over which aspects of it are higher priority. That people within an open-source project disagree over priorities is one of the things that lets open-source software have higher overall quality than closed-source software. This is because there are tons of different things that affect the quality of software, and different users care about different ones. We need to worry about getting behavior correct, having clear user interface, being fast, not using too much memory, not crashing, etc. In a tightly-managed project where the priorities are clearly defined by someone in charge (whether that's an individual, a small group of leaders, or a more democratic model like you seem to be proposing), you're still going to end up with a set of official priorities. Such priorities end up as official sanction to ignore some aspects of quality in favor of others, for example, being willing to sacrifice any amount of memory use in order to get a speed improvement. Now, we absolutely need to be willing to make tradeoffs; we should absolutely not assume that the status quo speed vs. memory tradeoff is the correct one, nor should we assume that all of the projects we currently work on are worth our time. But I think making tradeoffs in the presence of clearly-defined priorities stating that one side of the tradeoff is more important tends to produce bad decisions. If we all agree as a community that speed is really important, it becomes really hard (and maybe completely socially unacceptable) to make an argument that a particular speed for memory tradeoff is the wrong one to be making. On the flip side, though, there are decisions that have to be based on priorities, such as which things ship as supported products. We also can't be afraid to make these decisions because they look like dictating priorities. But I think in many cases they come somewhat naturally (though not without controversy) from what people are focusing on. -David -- ๐ L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ ๐ ๐ข Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ ๐ _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
