Re: [Debconf-team] [Debconf10-localteam] bursary team and global vs. local
Hi Micah,
Thanks for sending such a thoughtful (if long) email. My thoughts are below.
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 06:34:36PM -0400, micah wrote:
> On March 18th[1], Michael Schultheiss sent an email to
> debian-devel-announce and debconf-announce announcing that we are going
> to open up the sponsorship selection process, and soliciting help for
> people to work on sponsorship decisions. Several people responded and
> were added to the Debconf10 Teams page under the Travel Sponsorship
> sub-team of the larger Sponsorship Team[2]. The reason to send out this
> request for help was because it was decided to do so at the Global Team
> meeting on March 17th[3].
>
> From a process perspective, this is very confusing.
Yes. The global team felt strongly (and probably accurately) that travel
sponsorship should not be a purely local thing since, even more than most
globally relevant things having a worldwide set of perspectives is important to
know Debian contributors in different parts of the world.
> However, its confusing because the role of the global team vs. that of the
> local team is perceived differently by different people. [...] Essentially
> [the local team was roughly told that] the Global team typically defers to
> local team. It seems like this is not really how this has worked thus far if
> the local bursary team is put together for this purpose at one point, and
> then a month later the global team ignores that and generates its own.
I agree this involved miscommunications with regard to the relationship between
global and local parts of the DebConf team; my personal guess as to why is that
in January and February the non-US parts of the DebConf team were quite burned
out from DC9 and were ceding what would usually be global-team man-hours to the
DC10 team. This is the inverse of what happened during DC9, which isn't
surprising given how stressful that was. Such imbalances quite understandably
cause this kind of tension in either direction; I'm glad everyone seems to want
to get past it.
> I'm pretty sure that this was just an oversight and part of the general
> discombobulation about how the local and global parts fit together. Both
> Hydroxide and Mr. Beige have done their best to represent the local team at
> the global meetings, and I suspect that the local recruitment for this team
> at that earlier meeting was simply forgotten.
I don't remember if we mentioned it at the global team or not; if we did, the
reasoning of the global team which I mentioned above explains why that didn't
work for them in this case.
> However, there has been tension about this difference which manifested as the
> various local teams went about their business and began making decisions. So
> far, the issue has been that non-local people have not being included (most
> notably in the talks team). I believe that this has been worked out as Hans,
> from the local talks team, attended the global team meeting on March 31st[4]
> and a decision was made for a healthy way to include the non-local people in
> this process. Additionally, I know that the local talks team has been trying
> to do their best to change this dynamic and are interested in feedback on how
> to make this better.
Yes; a good guideline going forward would be to find ways to ensure that
non-local people can be aware of and comment on everything that's going on,
with less frequency/detail for things that are purely of local/site-specific
concern, and to ensure that they can be active and full participants in things
that are more generally relevant beyond the local site.
> In my opinion, we need the global team to make a few strides towards this.
> Some ideas: the global team meetings, where these decisions are being made,
> have not been announced to the local team with any reasonable advance notice.
Yes; this needs to be emailed to debconf-team much earlier than it is now,
fully agreed. (It could in theory go to debconf10-localteam too, but if we're
trying to maximize the local team's awareness of what the global team does,
everyone local ought to be on both lists. Likewise in reverse for global team
people who want to follow local team happenings.)
> They are also scheduled to favor european time, which doesn't really work for
> many people on the local team. This results in a weird dynamic where these
> groups are very different and disconnected.
Good point. Hello European DebConf organizers! Would you be willing to consider
staying up a few hours later to avoid conflicting with many DC10 people's
schedules? If not, would you be willing to consider weekend IRC meetings?
> In general, it might be better to stop the separation between the two groups
> and instead of there being a local team and a global team, instead say that
> we are all part of the Debconf effort. We have different mailing lists and
> IRC channels, yet this difference is subtle and has not really been needed in
> any substantive way. It might help eliminate some confusion if we stop have
> multiple channels and mailing lists.
The separation traditionally exists because all but two previous DebConfs have
occurred in countries where the native language was something other than
English. Thus usually local team discussions are mostly conducted in the native
language, and those local people with sufficient English skills attend both
local and global meetings keeping both groups in sync with the other. It's less
relevant in 2010 just as it was in 2007, but with less of a geographical and
social overlap between the historically Europe-based DebConf global organizers
and the local team than was true then.
> Secondly, please update the schedule[5] to reflect the new timeline regarding
> sponsorship decisions. I'm not exactly clear now what it is supposed to be,
> but I do know that the March 17th deadline for first-pass sponsorship
> decisions is *long* past, and I don't know what to tell people who are asking
> me about this. If I am properly clued in I will try to update it myself. I
> think I understand it has been turned into May 15th, but there may be other
> adjustments here that I am not aware of.
The original date was April 17, not March 17, but it has indeed passed. The
technical issues preventing the team from rating travel sponsorship requests
were only finally fixed a day or two ago. However this wasn't intended to be a
first pass of sponsorship decisions for every request; it was intended to be a
final decision for only the requests which can obviously be resolved one way or
other. This was a local team idea that the global team went along with, fwiw,
not originally a global team idea. Even if the date had been met, most people
wouldn't have heard back by then.
- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy@debian.org
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