Re: long term goals of debian membership
On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 12:23:31PM -0500, Neal H Walfield wrote:
<snip>
> winning way. Again, no one forces anyone to be here and when someone no
> longer want to be here, that person leaves.
No, they just go MIA, and leave their responsibilities and account unused.
Not very many maintainers (in fact only 3 I can think of in the 2 years I
have been with Debian) actually take themselves out of the project. This
is a management problem for accounts, and a security risk (because the
accounts are not being used, or checked).
We cannot increase this risk/problem. We need to be sure that people are
going to be around for awhile, and responsible enough to know when they
need to quit (because of whatever reason), or just take a break for a year
or so. This cannot be accomplished by making it easier to let people in,
but by making it easier to determine who is capable/worthy/whatever of
being a developer.
IMO, if we curve the number of people going into the NM queue, by setting
up goals for them before they even get there, then we will have a faster,
more capable set of NM administrators. Because then they will be able to
easily determine who is right for the job. They wont have to process every
joe shmoe that sends an email, since those people will go through a
"trial period" (sort of a filter, if you will), before hand.
The trick? Deciding what this trial period is, and how to organize it.
IMO, most of the "deciding what they do" should be a list of suggestions
from us, and some initiative on the part of the applicant. We shouldn't
have to bend over backwards to give them work. At the same time, the
areas of interest should not be roadblocked (like sponsors who do not
upload things for an applicant, or CVS access to docs, etc...).
Ben
--
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/ Ben Collins -- ...on that fantastic voyage... -- Debian GNU/Linux \
` bcollins@debian.org -- bcollins@openldap.org -- bcollins@linux.com '
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