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Re: Proposal: Recall the Project Leader



On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 07:43:22PM +0200, Denis Barbier wrote:
> Anthony Towns ends up his announce[1] about dunc-tank.org with these
> two paragraphs: [...]
>     A question that has been raised is whether the
>     organisation can be sufficiently "outside" of Debian when
>     the DPL is intimately involved.  I don't have the answer
>     to that - in my opinion it can be, but whether this one is
>     will be up to Debian to decide.
> The article's title mentioned in the first paragraph is: "Debian
> experiments with funding group to release 'etch' on time".  

The second page of the article includes the following quote from me,
and a rough summary of the actual situation:

  "It might turn out that Dunc-Tank is incompatible with Debian, and
   that's one of the reasons it's been quarantined into a separate group
   rather than being run as an experiment within Debian, but I personally
   don't think it will."

  Incidentally, as the Debian project is an association of individuals
  and not a for-profit organisation, there is no formal association
  with Dunc-Tank. Consequently, Dunc is not endorsed by Debian. However,
  Dunc consists entirely of Debian users who all share the common goal
  of bettering the distribution.

For comparison, that article got my city wrong (I live in Brisbane as
mentioned on the dunc-tank.org site, not Melbourne as was first in
the article, but apparently now corrected), and the ITwire interview
lists DPL elections as happening every two years, instead of every
year. Other articles, such as the slashdot story get it right first go:
"Dunc-Tank is not affiliated with the Debian Project directly, and in
fact was controversial on the debian-private list."

> But we, Debian developers, can make this confusion vanish, and I
> would like to propose that we answer to the valid question quoted
> in the second paragraph above by recalling our Project Leader, as
> allowed by our Constitution (section 4.1.1) and am seeking seconds
> for this proposal.

Seconded; though I imagine I'll have to redo this once I understand the
new procedures for proposing/seconding resolutions.

I'm seconding this because I do think it's a fair question for the project
to consider, and to make it clear I don't personally have any problem with
being recalled if that's what the project thinks is right and proper. If
I'm not DPL, I expect I'll continue doing what I have been: working on
dunc-tank.org, working on helping the release team get the release out,
poking at the security infrastructure to make sure it keeps behaving
itself, and continuing to support other folks who've approached me in
the past year where they still want that support. Frankly, I think we're
doing great, and I'm not remotely interested in quitting.

One thing I really appreciate is that Debian's an environment where if
you disagree with people you can be upfront about it, without worrying
that there'll be payback later. I'm very grateful that people, who
otherwise disagree with me, seem to trust my integrity and Debian's
processes enough to be able to act according to their beliefs, and not
forced to inaction out of fear. *That* is something to treasure.

AIUI, if the resolution passes, the secretary will need to setup
an immediate election, which will take nine weeks. During those nine
weeks, the technical committee chair (Bdale Garbee) and secretary (Manoj
Srivastava) will jointly exercise the DPL's powers where needed. The newly
elected DPL would serve for a year (unless recalled or resigning), meaning
the 2007 election would presumably happen in November, rather than March.

Given two weeks of discussion for this, two weeks of voting, and the nine
week election process, the earliest we'd have a DPL would be the end of
December by my count; so assuming this resolution passed and we released
on time, we'd be doing so without a DPL...

Oh, wait, I probably shouldn't be giving reasons to vote *for* the recall,
should I? :)

Cheers,
aj

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