On Tue, 2006-07-25 at 23:58 +0200, Alexander Schmehl wrote: > Yes, it is your time, energy and decission. And yes, we accept your > decission. But please understand, that it is our decission to tell you, > how disapointed we are of you by first failing to lead the team, then > not even helping us to get the job done, by helping us creating a list > of open tasks. Hold on there, Alexander. With all due respect, I think you are not seeing things clearly right now. The claim that Andreas has failed to lead the team has gone undisputed for too long. A few vocal persons have used this as an argument to radically restructure the DebConf organisation. So far, the restructuring seems to have failed, because there is now even less clarity about who is on the team or not, in a leadership position or not. The focus is on repeating "we are disappointed" without any notion of who "we" are, and what "we" did or didn't do to contribute to this state of affairs. Andreas has been doing DebConfs for several years. It's unpaid, voluntary work, but it's still a *lot* of work that he has had to put in to make it work at all. So it's hardly surprising that he tried to do a few things differently in DebConf6: he encouraged people to make more autonomous decisions and took less load on himself compared to last year. However, DebConf6 had many unforeseen challenges. Network problems, money transfer problems, food quality below expectations, to name a few. These were part of the local reality and were beyond the range of influence when the conference began. They had to be dealt with while things were already running. The people who were now empowered to make very autonomous decisions were obviously not up to the challenge. People invaded each others' areas of responsibility. Plans and actions began to drift in chaotic directions, and combined with Andreas' decision to shift more load from himself to the rest of the team, this resulted in the impression that nobody is in charge and people started concentrating on directing the blame away from themselves. If you followed the conference from start to finish, there were clear signs of exhaustion among the organisers even before Debian Day. Gradually, this affected participants as well. Some were simply sullen, others came offering their help -- even money -- to fix whatever was the cause of the bad atmosphere. The eruption at the formal dinner was an expression of disappointment, visible for all. In the end, it appears that Andreas has been selected as the culprit. Has he made mistakes? Of course. But to map the failures of DebConf6 onto him alone is simply hiding your head in the sand. DebConf is a team effort. When it fails, the failure is due to the team, not a single person. Now, back to the original question of pending tasks. Felipe suggested [0] two things (good suggestions IMO): to ask Andreas for more items to go on the list, and to ask Andreas for help in carrying out the tasks themselves. I think it's quite reasonable -- wise, even -- of Andreas not to involve himself with the latter, given the current circumstances. [0] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20060725.125603.4d2432b8.en.html As for assembling the list: what makes you think Andreas has the list I asked for? He doesn't. It's distributed over several persons as it should be when a team effort is running. The partial one he does have, I have already discussed with him both face-to-face during DebConf6 as well as briefly over the phone. My reason for asking publicly was precisely that different people may have different tasks pending, and are now in uncertainty about what to do with them. This is about getting closure for DebConf6, not hearing yet again the cackle about disappointment and whose fault it is that we are in the current situation. So I repeat the questions: I'd like to know what tasks people still have pending from DebConf6, and what you all think we should do about them. Are there any good reasons not to drop all these tasks and consider DebConf6 an abandoned project? I'll add another one that comes to mind now: What is the minimal set of tasks that must be done to bring DebConf6 to a (legal) conclusion? -- Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe@paniq.net>
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