GNOME leadership [was Re: So what do people *except* me want from the foundation?]
[Apologies in my lack of interaction in this thread; I've just started studying for the bar and have just moved to a place with no internet; the combination has left me pretty brutally offline all week, as I will be for most of the rest of the summer.] 2009/6/2 Jason D. Clinton m...@jasonclinton.com: On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: What do you expect from the foundation? Leadership. I want there to never be another DVCS mutli-year long flame war. The only reason it ended is that Red Hat has the people, servers and bandwidth to JFDI for something of that magnitude. That worked that time. But Red Hat shouldn't be forced in to taking three-four employees off their other responsibilities to prevent GNOME from tearing itself apart. We need a way to make authoritative decisions in a healthy way and then to share the responsibility of making it happen without giving the appearance of back-room dealings or rule by fiat. Consensus building and making travel happen (to affordable locations) are the only two things I want to see the Foundation doing. [Note that you're talking about two different things when you're talking about leadership and consensus-building/decision-making apparatus. I will address leadership here.] The useful question is probably not 'why is the Foundation not leading' or 'how could the Foundation lead'; I think probably the better question is 'why is no one from the community leading'? (Because you really don't want leadership by elected committee.) The Foundation may be part of the cause of that. It certainly has sucked up time and energy from a lot of dedicated people, helping contribute to burnout without much to show for it. I am not sure how to avoid that, though. Is the existence of the board hurting in other ways? It seems some people look to it for leadership, which might hurt the emergence of other possible leaders. This was not the case when I started working on GNOME, but may be the case these days- dunno. Our historic inability to stop bikeshedding is probably part of the problem; leadership when people are nipping at your heels all the time is not fun or interesting. Our supporting corporations have helped contribute to this, probably; they've hired our best and brightest (good) and made them work on corporate priorities (less good) or work in private or on projects related-to-but-not-really-of-GNOME (even less good). That saps momentum, energy, etc. We've never really had something equivalent to TLF or Transmeta or Google, allowing our best and brightest to work on GNOME 90-95% as they saw fit, allowing them to be leaders. All the partner companies have at times allowed things close to this (Jeff at Ubuntu, Miguel at Ximian, several RH folks over the years, etc.) but nothing like kernel has had, or even (as best as I can tell) as KDE has had the past 4-5 years with aseigo. Maybe a good question to ask would be 'why is this'? Is it that the corporation's goals aren't closely aligned enough with ours? Is is that we've burned them out, and they've then let the companies pull them away from GNOME? Is it that because of the bikeshedding (or other reasons) they just think that dealing with GNOME is more trouble than it is worth, so they won't invest in our leadership? (Moblin's development pattern suggests this might be the case.) Many theories to explore here. At any rate, I agree completely that we need some strong leaders to develop in GNOME. But the Foundation is not the place for it. I think the right question is 'why have leaders not come from other sources? what can the Foundation do, if anything, to help other leaders emerge and get the support they need to do their work?' I have no easy answers to either of these, though. = Two more marginal observations on leadership in the Foundation context: First, historically, the Foundation doesn't lead or make final decisions because the Foundation and the board were very explicitly told by the community, through our charter, *not* to lead. The board's role was infrastructure, support for existing leaders, and communication with sponsors. This was primarily, as best as I can tell, in order to prevent the Foundation's sponsors from exerting control/leadership of the community through the Foundation- if they were going to do it, they were going to have to do it the old-fashioned way, by hiring hackers ;) I'm not sure this argument makes sense anymore, but everyone involved should understand this is the single biggest reason why the Foundation does not provide leadership. (It does not explain the failure of other sources of leadership.) Second, leadership in a volunteer/multi-corporate context is a tricky problem. The git thing is a perfectly good example of this. If we'd had a magical leader who wisely sat down and said 'we will use ', then what? I'm highly skeptical that magical 'leadership' could have done much better than what we ended up with- they still
Re: GNOME leadership [was Re: So what do people *except* me want from the foundation?]
2009/6/5 Luis Villa luis.vi...@gmail.com: At any rate, I agree completely that we need some strong leaders to develop in GNOME. But the Foundation is not the place for it. I think the right question is 'why have leaders not come from other sources? what can the Foundation do, if anything, to help other leaders emerge and get the support they need to do their work?' I have no easy answers to either of these, though. Or to put it more bluntly, now that I think of it: why don't we have a BDFL? Why have we chewed up and spit out all the potential candidates for the title? Luis ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME leadership [was Re: So what do people *except* me want from the foundation?]
Hi, 2009/6/8 Luis Villa l...@tieguy.org: 2009/6/5 Luis Villa luis.vi...@gmail.com: At any rate, I agree completely that we need some strong leaders to develop in GNOME. But the Foundation is not the place for it. I think the right question is 'why have leaders not come from other sources? what can the Foundation do, if anything, to help other leaders emerge and get the support they need to do their work?' I have no easy answers to either of these, though. Or to put it more bluntly, now that I think of it: why don't we have a BDFL? Why have we chewed up and spit out all the potential candidates for the title? Another important question is: leader of what? BDFL of what? I honestly don't see how only one leader could alone set the direction for desktop, platform, mobile, web, marketing, release management, etc. We're just too big today. I've commented before[1] that we should definitely consider having more clear/official leadership on specific domains of the project. --lucasr [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/lucasr/2008/06/15/notes-on-the-future-of-gnome-problems-and-questions/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME leadership [was Re: So what do people *except* me want from the foundation?]
On Mon, 2009-06-08 at 14:47 +0100, Lucas Rocha wrote: Hi, 2009/6/8 Luis Villa l...@tieguy.org: 2009/6/5 Luis Villa luis.vi...@gmail.com: At any rate, I agree completely that we need some strong leaders to develop in GNOME. But the Foundation is not the place for it. I think the right question is 'why have leaders not come from other sources? what can the Foundation do, if anything, to help other leaders emerge and get the support they need to do their work?' I have no easy answers to either of these, though. Or to put it more bluntly, now that I think of it: why don't we have a BDFL? Why have we chewed up and spit out all the potential candidates for the title? Another important question is: leader of what? BDFL of what? I honestly don't see how only one leader could alone set the direction for desktop, platform, mobile, web, marketing, release management, etc. We're just too big today. I've commented before[1] that we should definitely consider having more clear/official leadership on specific domains of the project. I agree with this. I think it would be best if foundation members would elect a small board and then the different teams would produce a ambassador themselves. The board would then delegates tasks to this ambassador, who if he knows somebody more competent at the task, could again delegate it (although I think the ambassador should remain the responsible wrt the board). The question how the ambassador would be chosen per team is something that I would leave up to the teams to choose. The procedure to choose an ambassador per team might not always be the same as having a meeting together at GUADEC, noticing nobody wants to do it, in the evening making somebody drunk enough to accept this task, giving him more drinks to congratulate and thank him, etc.. Like how we'd probably end up doing it for mobile, platform and desktop. I would also give certain leadership capabilities to said ambassador. Like for example conflict resolution between members of the same team. Moderation. Architectural decision making. Talking with the release team about those architectural decisions, etc (we can adjust this list whenever we notice it needs adjustment). I'm not usually pro hierarchical systems like this. But as long as it's two or three levels deep, provided everyone understands the necessity of it, I think it's fine. Just don't create three overlapping governments with on top a federal one. I can tell you how bad that is. Bad. -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
