Re: Question about membership.

[Charles Plessy]

Le Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 05:42:24PM -0300, Margarita Manterola a écrit :
> On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:02 PM, Charles Plessy  wrote:
> 
> >> * Do you need to come up with a GR to change membership procedures, or is 
> >> there
> >> a different way?
> >
> > I will cast a GR if I think it is needed. If I am wrong, the result will be
> > NOTA, and I will resign as DPL.
> 
> You'd really resign as DPL if a certain GR that you wanted was not
> passed?

Hi Margarita,

let me clear your doubts.

I think that one of the roles of the DPL is to lead debates to conclusion. I
want a debate on membership, and if nobody steps up to lead it after my
election (if it happens), I will lead it. If the result is a consensus, no GR
will be needed. Is a result is camps so strongly opposed that chosing one
option will demotivate many DDs, I will not cast a GR and prefer status quo. If
the result it that the Project as a whole is hesitating between possibilities
that are acceptable, I will cast a GR to make a choice and go ahead.

This is what I mean by ‘if I think it is needed’. I never wrote anywhere that I
will twist arms with GRs. Here is the extract of my platform about GRs:

  “GRs: Sometimes, lack of consensus and action does not reflect conflict or
  division, but simply that in a large project like Debian, which heavily relies
  on electronic communication, it can be difficult to get the feeling of
  approbation. In these cases, I think that a vote can be a very healthy 
process,
  and I will initiate GRs when the Project is blocked on choosing between
  directions that are all acceptable.”

To answer your question about quitting, why would a DPL resign after casting a
GR that results in NOTA? A GR draws energy from the project, and if badly
managed, can create tensions and divisions. In particular on the membership
issue, if as DPL I would cast a GR that leads to NOTA, it would mean that I
failed to understand the situation, and possibly harmed the project. I think
that such a failure would be so high that a demission is the correct reaction.

I hope that I convinced you that it has nothing to do with which option I would
vote for if such a GR would be proposed.

Have a nice Sunday,

-- 
Charles


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Re: Question about membership.

[Margarita Manterola]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:02 PM, Charles Plessy  wrote:

>> * Do you need to come up with a GR to change membership procedures, or is 
>> there
>> a different way?
>
> I will cast a GR if I think it is needed. If I am wrong, the result will be
> NOTA, and I will resign as DPL.

You'd really resign as DPL if a certain GR that you wanted was not
passed?  I think, once again, that you are mistaking the role of the
DPL.  If you were to be elected, it'd mean that enough people had
wanted you to lead them. What would be the sense in resigning just
because a certain GR is not passed?  Being a DPL means leading a
community, it doesn't mean that whatever you think is what the
community wants.

I had said before that I'd vote for all the other candidates.  I was
giving you the benefit of the doubt, because of the work you've done
on DebianMed.  However, you've proved more than once that your opinion
on the role of the DPL is way to different than mine, so I have made
up my mind and decided that I will not be voting for you.

-- 
Besos,
Marga


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Re: Question about membership.

[Charles Plessy]

> * Did you or do you plan to talk to DAM/Frontdesk about membership changes?

Discussion must be public from the start. DAM/Frontdesk is contribution
essential. Your position will be first in the discussion's summary.

> * Do you need to come up with a GR to change membership procedures, or is 
> there
> a different way?

I will cast a GR if I think it is needed. If I am wrong, the result will be
NOTA, and I will resign as DPL.


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Re: Question about membership.

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Hi Charles,

thanks for you long answer. But unfortunately I feel like a journalist now,
instead of getting a short *answer* to my questions, I got a looong talk around
them. So here are they again, in a very simplified form:

* Did you or do you plan to talk to DAM/Frontdesk about membership changes?

* Do you need to come up with a GR to change membership procedures, or is there
a different way?

Thanks,

Bernd

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Re: Question about membership.

[Charles Plessy]

Le Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 02:06:44PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz a écrit :
> Charles Plessy wrote:
> 
> > If I am elected DPL, I will re-open the discussion and lead them in a way 
> > that
> > maximises everybody's contribution, for instance by making pauses if 
> > necessary,
> > and by posting neutral summaries. After the discussion reaches conclusion, I
> > will initiate a GR.
> 
> When did you talk with DAM and the NM FrontDesk people about such things? Do 
> you
> think it is the DPL's job to initiate GRs to change such procedures? Is a GR
> necessary at all or how are such things decided in Debian? When would you 
> need a GR?

Hi Bernd,

I think that discussions on membership have to be held in public. If a
pre-packed propsal is perpared behind the scenes and proposed to the DDs as a
fait accompli, I think that it will face a strong opposition.

I do not think that a DPL has the role of defining the content of a GR in such
a debate. However, our constitution gives to the DPL the role of leading
discussions, and to propose draft GRs. In my understanding of the constitution,
the content of the GR matches the result of the discussion, not the personal
opinion of the DPL. This is what I propose and nothing else. Here is the
content of my platform about membership:

 ‘Becoming a member gives motivation, responsibility and reward. Currently one
 has to prove a lot to become become a DD, and I think that the level we require
 for new members is nearly to be able to do distribution-wide quality control
 and participate release operations. While it is exactly that manpower that we
 are critically needing, I do not think that it is in the interest of the
 project to be so restrictive on membership. I liked a lot an earlier
 proposition that any DD can nominate a new member in the project. This
 resembles how the DM status is working, and it is working well. Importantly, to
 make it easier to enter the project also makes it easier to leave it for a
 while. With a more appealing emeritus system, we can give motivations to DDs
 who are lacking time to take a break officially instead of simply becoming
 inactive for a long interval. And if lost membership can be recovered more
 easily, I think that we can also ease the conditions for cancelling inactive
 memberships. I will restart discussions on membership, with a vote as a goal.’

In the question I sent to the other candidates, to fuel the debate I reminded a
proposition that was made and that I find interesting. I tried to make a bit of
prospective, speculating that it would not be very popular, and wondering what
would make it feel more secure. Taking the recent Bits from the NM process as
an inspiration, which specifies that an account must be 6 month old to qualify
for becoming Application Managers, I wondered if that requirement for seniority
should be kept or not in a new system. Obviously, opinions about this differ.

I do not have a premade conclusion about Debian's membership process, and I am
not seeking to be elected for pushing one solution or the other. However, I am
campaining for having the membership issue solved in the next DPL's term, and
will put this priority high in my list if I am elected. Other candidates have
suggested that what Debian needs is a polished version of Joerg's proposal. If
as a result of my election, I lead a debate that results in a GR that does
this, I will consider it as an accomplishment, whatever my personal opinon is.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan 


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Re: Question about membership.

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Charles Plessy wrote:

> If I am elected DPL, I will re-open the discussion and lead them in a way that
> maximises everybody's contribution, for instance by making pauses if 
> necessary,
> and by posting neutral summaries. After the discussion reaches conclusion, I
> will initiate a GR.

When did you talk with DAM and the NM FrontDesk people about such things? Do you
think it is the DPL's job to initiate GRs to change such procedures? Is a GR
necessary at all or how are such things decided in Debian? When would you need 
a GR?


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Re: Question about membership.

[Matthew Johnson]

On Thu Mar 25 21:19, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>   The GR we had on DAM proposal [2] has been only on the procedure which
>   led to the d-d-a mail. In fact, the outcome of the GR asks for
>   discussion+consensus (or vote), but we've never dwelled into that
>   afterwords.

I did try quite hard, but it never got anywhere

Matt

-- 
Matthew Johnson


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Re: Question about membership.

[Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt]

Charles Plessy  writes:
> In this thread it was proposed to trust DDs to nominate other members
> and I found the idea very interesting. In order to make it more
> consensual, there is probably a need for making concessions like
> shortlisting the trusted DDs according to some criteria like the time
> they have already spent in the project. I would actually be tempted to
> propose a more variable but more symbolic measurment of time: having
> been part of the project for at least one full release cycle.

I don't see why someone who joined the project a few months ago should
be trusted less than someone that got in, for example, before we had any
formal checking of new members. This idea just doesn't work.

Marc
-- 
BOFH #198:
Post-it Note Sludge leaked into the monitor.


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Re: Question about membership.

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 09:17:44AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> In this thread it was proposed to trust DDs to nominate other members
> and I found the idea very interesting.  In order to make it more
> consensual, there is probably a need for making concessions like
> shortlisting the trusted DDs according to some criteria like the time
> they have already spent in the project.

The reason to be somehow strict before accepting someone as a DD is
essentially trust. A DD will be able to upload any package to our
distribution, so we should trust his/her judgement in when to (not) use
such a privilege.

Of course it is difficult to come up with a metric for trustworthiness.
Nevertheless, a metric that works surprisingly well in practice (at
least in our volunteer-based FOSS world) is to look at what and how the
applicant has done in the past [1]. This metric is actively used in the
NM process where it is paired with questions on our principles.

The problem I see with what you propose is that "the time they have
already spent in the project" is, for once, not well defined (when do
you start counting?). Additionally, it tells you: nothing about the
abilities of the applicant, nothing about his/her interactions with
other, nothing about how much he/she share our principles. So if, as you
observe, there is resistance to "nominations", I doubt that adding time
would do any better.

[1] note that the implicit stuff "done" that I intend here is more
general than "packaging", it also includes stuff like "interaction
with others"

> I have put membership issues as a first priority in my
> platform. Partly because

Yes, but as I've observed in my rebuttals I haven't really got what you
are _actually_ proposing.

> So my question to other candidates is simple: what is your opinion and
> program about membership?

I've discussed this quite extensively in my platform already.
To recap:

- The addition of DMs have been very good for our project.

  I like the existence of such a status, but I believe we should
  "reward" DMs more, in terms of visibility. On one hand, we currently
  have quite a mess of terminology which we might want to fix, even if
  it is hard to do that at this point. On the other hand, we should give
  out some symbolic "gift", like a @debian.org email address (just an
  example, we can find another sub-domain or something): it might seem
  silly to all of us, but it can be important for newbies!

- I would like to see a proper vote---no matter its result---on the
  establishment of a new project member status (i.e. with voting rights)
  for non-packaging contributors.

  The GR we had on DAM proposal [2] has been only on the procedure which
  led to the d-d-a mail. In fact, the outcome of the GR asks for
  discussion+consensus (or vote), but we've never dwelled into that
  afterwords.

Cheers.

[2] http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_002

-- 
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Re: Question about membership.

[Margarita Manterola]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Charles Plessy  wrote:

> Following the ‘Membership procedures’ GR, discussion on membership were 
> started
> after the Lenny release, but eventually stopped. In this thread it was 
> proposed
> to trust DDs to nominate other members and I found the idea very interesting.
> In order to make it more consensual, there is probably a need for making
> concessions like shortlisting the trusted DDs according to some criteria like
> the time they have already spent in the project. I would actually be tempted 
> to
> propose a more variable but more symbolic measurment of time: having been part
> of the project for at least one full release cycle.

I was sad to see the discussion die, because I liked the idea of
having ways to integrate people that were not packagers.  However, I
do not think that simply "nominating" someone should give them full DD
access.  I think that even if it has it's flaws, the NM process plays
a very important role, getting skilled people to work for Debian.
Simply nominating someone would mean a lot of people coming into
Debian without enough knowledge.  This is NOT a good idea.

> I have put membership issues as a first priority in my platform. Partly 
> because
> I have contributeed to the rejection of a proposal and feel resposible to not
> leave the Project in inaction, partly because I think that the the 
> contribution
> of DMs is growing and I do not feel like leaving them out of the project. In 
> my
> platform, I suggest in my second priority (less restricted operations) that
> social control can replace technical control. I think that most DMs could be
> DDs now.

DMs are not left out of the project.  They have a different role, but
they are definitely not out of the project.  Social control is very
hard to exercise on a project as big as Debian.  We need to be able to
*trust* that person with their responsibilities, the whole point of
the NM process is to allow us to trust.  A one-person nomination would
not give us enough trust.

> If I am elected DPL, I will re-open the discussion and lead them in a way that
> maximises everybody's contribution, for instance by making pauses if 
> necessary,
> and by posting neutral summaries. After the discussion reaches conclusion, I
> will initiate a GR.

You don't need to be elected DPL to reopen a discussion or make
neutral summaries.  You also don't need to be DPL to initiate a GR.  I
think you are mistaking what the role of the DPL is.

> So my question to other candidates is simple: what is your opinion and program
> about membership?

My opinion is that the original proposal sent by Joerg Jaspert, maybe
modified a bit with the comments received during the discussion, is
what would benefit the project most.  I would very much like the
discussion to be re-opened and a GR to be passed.  Even if there is
consensus, this would be such a change to the current status, that I
think validating it with a GR is useful and thus a vote should be
called.  I don't think the "one person nomination" idea would have
much support.

I'm not planning on starting the discussion myself, however.  I'm more
interested in finding ways of attracting and keeping more people
active in Debian, and that's what I plan to work on.

-- 
Besos,
Marga


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Re: Question about membership.

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 09:17:44AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Following the ‘Membership procedures’ GR, discussion on membership
> were started after the Lenny release, but eventually stopped. In this
> thread it was proposed to trust DDs to nominate other members and I
> found the idea very interesting.  In order to make it more consensual,
> there is probably a need for making concessions like shortlisting the
> trusted DDs according to some criteria like the time they have already
> spent in the project. I would actually be tempted to propose a more
> variable but more symbolic measurment of time: having been part of the
> project for at least one full release cycle.

I don't think this will help, at all.

The DM procedure allows people to upload packages after just one Debian
Developer has advocated them. This is a good way for people without full
developer status to cooperate on Debian.

Giving people full developer status should not be something we go over
lightly. I happen to know that frontdesk and the DAM do not mind a
'lightweight' T&S part of the NM procedure for those people who have
shown exceptional skill.

However, I don't think we should reduce on the P&P part of NM. We do not
wish people to join the project who do not understand what 'free
software' means.

[...]
-- 
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works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is
trying to fool the system.
  http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html


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Re: Question about membership.

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Wed, Mar 24 2010, Charles Plessy wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Following the ‘Membership procedures’ GR, discussion on membership
> were started after the Lenny release, but eventually stopped. In this
> thread it was proposed to trust DDs to nominate other members and I
> found the idea very interesting.  In order to make it more consensual,
> there is probably a need for making concessions like shortlisting the
> trusted DDs according to some criteria like the time they have already
> spent in the project. I would actually be tempted to propose a more
> variable but more symbolic measurment of time: having been part of the
> project for at least one full release cycle.

Can you explain why you think that mere length of time with
 Debian is a good metric for the ability to judge who should be a part
 of Debian? Does the duration of stay also lend credence to the DD's
 opinion of the quality of fellow DDs? Do you think that we could
 leverage this avility, gained by tenure, in other ways?

manoj
 not sure mere tenure lends itself to great judgement
-- 
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Manoj Srivastava    
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Re: Question about membership.

[Holger Levsen]

Hi Charles,

On Donnerstag, 25. März 2010, Charles Plessy wrote:
> [...] In order to make it more consensual, there is probably a
> need for making concessions like shortlisting the trusted DDs according to
> some criteria like [...]

What do you mean by "shortlisting"?


cheers,
Holger


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