Re: Questions for Jeroen van Wolffelaar and Andreas Schuldei
On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 03:32:58PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> (Again, campaigning period doesn't start until Sunday. Please feel free
> to ignore this until then)
Platforms are up (except one), so...
> This is about the DPL team. Andreas, your platform was quite heavily
> based on it. Jeroen, I understand that it's something that you were
> heavily involved in. According to Andreas's platform, it was supposed
> to:
>
> * distribute workload, avoiding burn-out and problems related to
> real-world unavailability of individual developers;
>
> Did this happen? Branden has been fairly noticably absent in terms of
> providing leadership - queries to leader@d.o have gone unanswered for
> long periods of time.
I cannot make generic statements for responses to leader@, as they were
not automatically forwarded. As I wrote in my platform[1]:
| An important thing I learned is that in order for such a team to work
| effectively, it is required that the whole team is involved in (at least
| informed of) all what's going on, and that an agenda is maintained and
| enforced, and ensuring that assigned (delegated) tasks are fulfilled.
I notice I didn't write it explicitly, but I will request leader@ mail
to be forwarded to the full team -- if people have issues that really
should be 'for my eyes only', jeroen@debian.org would work. Of course I
will announce so to d-d-a, so that people know there's a slightly
broader distribution of such mail.
As to your question of workload distribution, there was a bit of
that, but not really many numerous issues -- a number of very hard
issues were worked on with the whole team though.
> * keep regularly in touch with a larger part of the project, to be more
> proactive about difficulties, and detect them earlier;
>
> The DPL team's communication sucked. What would you do differently, and
> how would you do it?
I'll have reserved a few hours each week to do exclusively leader-type
things. I'll simply put on the team's year-agenda to have the 4 promised
public reviews, which will at the bare minimum include what has
happened. I choose the interval carefully to be often enough, but still
not too frequent to have awkward issues like "eh, nothing happened this
week, we'll keep silent". In addition, you'll hear from me directly via
the "insider reports", with which I'll also try to regularly choose
areas where there was DPL (team) involvement.
Other than the 4 reports, I will send mail to d-d-a or whatever
appropriate list when something significant happens, for example, w.r.t.
the Code-of-Conduct installment process.
> * help build broader consensus by functioning as a 'chair' in Debian;
>
> This didn't really happen either, did it? How would you make sure it
> did next year?
Individual DPL team member contributions did help a bit, but well, not
very successfully. I'm afraid the state of the lists is such that
building consensus merely by providing insightful mails (a significant
number of people is providing insightful comments to threads, but it's
hard to find them among all the noise). In a way, my view was too
optimistic. By improving the atmosphere and productivity of the lists in
general, I believe it will be better possible for consensus being
reached, without per se direct consensus-building by the DPL team
members, but because *anyone* can help finding a good solution. A
compromise can best be found by those that are intimately familiar with
the subject in question.
> * make sure that decisions that need to be made are really made, even
> though that means to keep track of a lot of things, takes time and
> perhaps requires to be in multiple places at the same time;
>
> What would you say are the most important decisions that were made by
> the DPL team this year? How many of them could not have been made
> without the DPL team?
You misunderstood the point, it was about the practice of discussions
turning around in rounds without yielding a conclusion. When I noticed
the nvi vs vim discussion wasn't going anywhere, I started a poll about
it, as I did with the maintainer field issue for derivates. Such
decisions shouldn't be made by any DPL or DPL team, but by the
respective responsibles. I still need to send prods to see that both of
those issues to a resolution of some sorts now that discussion faded
away on both and there's some view on what people think.
> * have the most appropriate person be responsible for their areas of
> expertise. Everyone has unique talents and motivations which make
> certain tasks more enjoyable for them than for others and lets them deal
> with them more efficiently.
>
> Who were the members of the DPL team? What areas were they responsible
> for? If you retain the DPL team, would you make any changes?
Branden Robinson, Steve Langasek, Bdale Garbee, Enrico Zini, Andreas
Schuldei, Benjamin Mako Hill, and myself. There was no strict division
of labour, but Steve was involved in those times things were about
Release and release-related issues, and generally at most times for
sensible advice, Bdale mostly for issues dealing with companies, and
advice where there was need for mediation, being a very broadly
respected guy. Branden himself was definitely the specialist on
financial areas, and I myself was working amongst others on some of the
infrastructure bits. This is all just a global idea of some example
specialisms I could think of.
I will definitely have a different team proposed, which as you can seen
now in my platform, will be announced in less than two weeks from now.
Some people will stay, I think continuity is important, and it makes it
easier for me to have at least some people I've already built up a good
trust relation with. Suggestions, including nominations of oneself or
others, and even 'rather not this person', welcome privately.
> A couple of the implementation details:
>
> * The team meets regularly and frequently (weekly, up to 1h), to discuss
> new issues and review ongoing tasks.
>
> This seemed to be dropped pretty quickly. Do you think that was the
> right decision?
To drop it? In retrospect, no, it made the agenda become more chaotic,
and didn't have 'sync' moments in the issues working on. For example,
when 4 meetings in a row a topic has yielded 'still no result', one
needs to think of alternatives. I was a bit disappointed that it didn't
seem to be possible, so will be more clearly demanding a bit of
commitment to at least attend once every 2 weeks, and continue meeting
even when some people cannot make it.
> * Public minutes of private meetings are made available where discretion
> allows; likewise, a public agenda is made available in advance listing
> all non-sensitive agenda items, in order to allow and invite public
> discussion and public feedback before decisions are made.
>
> This never really happened. Do you think that was the right decision?
> Why did somebody have to notice that DPL team activity reports had
> stopped some time ago before anybody on the team publicly admitted
> this?
It happened in the beginning, but due to fixed meetings stopping, also
the whole pre- and post-meeting bits unfortunately went into unuse. It
takes energy to reverse such trend, and nobody in the team did find that
energy in the end. Trolling through mail and IRC logs is also much more
cumbersome than summarising a shortish meeting where all items are
passing by.
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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