Re: congratulations to our ftp-master team
On 12/15/05, Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net> wrote:
> If there is a serious risk that these people would so blatantly
> disregard our constitution
That certainly seems to be the case, judging from the discussion that
followed Bdale's "Structural Evolution" Debconf5 talk[1] - here's a
transcript of the relevant portion:
<Branden Robinson>: One of the concerns that we've seen crop up
periodically over the years is that we can refactor the project
leadership as much as we like but it's not going to do a lot of good
if not everybody feels like they are part of the governed. And there
are areas in the Debian Project that are vested with authority that
predates the constitution. I've spoken with some of these people (and
they've made postings over the years) - and they're not comfortable
exactly with the idea of, say, the possibility of a madman DPL, for
example. And I'm not sure that these same historical roles will be any
more comfortable with a different thing. You know: "We've been doing
this for ten years now. You can change the constitution, you can put a
board in there, you can put a person in there... Do what you want, but
in the end this work's still got to be done." There's no benefit to
them in recognising...
<Bdale Garbee>: So there're a couple of fundamental things that come
to mind when we start talking about this. One is that I think
organisational structure - good organisational structure - very rarely
does anything to guarantee success, but if you get the wrong struture
it really can impede progress and success. That's sort of one idea.
And the other one is that - it's been my observation that, every time
I personally have ended up in the situation where I've started to
think I was indispensable (and believe me, it's happened at various
times in my history) - when something finally forced me to realise
that that wasn't true, things in general sort of picked up pace and
moved better as a result. And so there is this sort of trade-off, I
think, between motivating participation and how you actually sort of
keep from getting stuck in a rut or something. So... I don't know that
I have any more brilliant ideas than that.
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/debconf5/mpeg/2005-07-16/08-Structural_Evolution-Bdale_Garbee.mpeg
--
Andrew Saunders
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