On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 09:17:44AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> In this thread it was proposed to trust DDs to nominate other members
> and I found the idea very interesting. In order to make it more
> consensual, there is probably a need for making concessions like
> shortlisting the trusted DDs according to some criteria like the time
> they have already spent in the project.
The reason to be somehow strict before accepting someone as a DD is
essentially trust. A DD will be able to upload any package to our
distribution, so we should trust his/her judgement in when to (not) use
such a privilege.
Of course it is difficult to come up with a metric for trustworthiness.
Nevertheless, a metric that works surprisingly well in practice (at
least in our volunteer-based FOSS world) is to look at what and how the
applicant has done in the past [1]. This metric is actively used in the
NM process where it is paired with questions on our principles.
The problem I see with what you propose is that "the time they have
already spent in the project" is, for once, not well defined (when do
you start counting?). Additionally, it tells you: nothing about the
abilities of the applicant, nothing about his/her interactions with
other, nothing about how much he/she share our principles. So if, as you
observe, there is resistance to "nominations", I doubt that adding time
would do any better.
[1] note that the implicit stuff "done" that I intend here is more
general than "packaging", it also includes stuff like "interaction
with others"
> I have put membership issues as a first priority in my
> platform. Partly because
Yes, but as I've observed in my rebuttals I haven't really got what you
are _actually_ proposing.
> So my question to other candidates is simple: what is your opinion and
> program about membership?
I've discussed this quite extensively in my platform already.
To recap:
- The addition of DMs have been very good for our project.
I like the existence of such a status, but I believe we should
"reward" DMs more, in terms of visibility. On one hand, we currently
have quite a mess of terminology which we might want to fix, even if
it is hard to do that at this point. On the other hand, we should give
out some symbolic "gift", like a @debian.org email address (just an
example, we can find another sub-domain or something): it might seem
silly to all of us, but it can be important for newbies!
- I would like to see a proper vote---no matter its result---on the
establishment of a new project member status (i.e. with voting rights)
for non-packaging contributors.
The GR we had on DAM proposal [2] has been only on the procedure which
led to the d-d-a mail. In fact, the outcome of the GR asks for
discussion+consensus (or vote), but we've never dwelled into that
afterwords.
Cheers.
[2] http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_002
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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