Giacomo Catenazzi <cate@debian.org> writes:
>> On 22 Sep 2015, at 23:00, Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:
>>
>> Margarita Manterola <margamanterola@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 10:29 PM, Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:
>>>> Could someone explain the purpose of the co-ordination team?
>>>
>>> From last week's meeting [1]:
>>>
>>> This team is in charge of facilitating the work of other teams. This
>>> means that it makes sure that people are not blocked, providing help
>>> in the form of people-power and advice. Additionally, it makes sure
>>> that deadlines are met, that teams do their job and that they are
>>> talking to each other.
>>>
>>> [1] The meeting was called by the chairs, who decided to invite
>>> Stefano, Bernelle and me. I complained pretty loudly about the
>>> privateness of the meeting and the separate channel, but my complaints
>>> were not enough to change that particular meeting. The team mission
>>> reproduced above was pretty much the only thing that we could agree
>>> on.
>>
>> Wow! "Motherhood and Apple Pie"
>>
>> That would seem to be a definition of what anyone in orga should be
>> doing by default, at all times, assuming they are paying the slightest
>> attention.
>>
>> If we need to set up a new team for that, we are in deep shit.
>>
>
> Phil… you are in orga since long time, so you know how thing are
> working. Many orga people care only on few things/tasks and they
> don’t follow all organisation. Core orga also have a real job and real
> live, so they could be unavailable for few months.
> But mainly it is because it was a big push from DC15 people to
> avoid -team, and get decision delegations to subteam (which
> indirectly it was done also not to inform entire team, to avoid
> discussions).
>
> You are also a member of video (sorry if I use you as example,
> nothing personal, but we tent do over discuss ideal case, which
> doesn’t exist, IMO). How -team could know the status of video,
> when shipping discussion should be taken (in DC14 the
> shipping discussion started much too late, but thanks Carl we
> had alternate video materials). This year I relayed various
> statuses of video team to -team meeting (I think most about non
> optimal meeting time for core video-team). [Also nattie is
> unavailable on Monday evening. NOTE: and for DC15 and
> DC16 things are better than in many other DCs: timezones
> love us!]
>
> So someone should be in charge to get information from team
> and check if things are working according other team plans.
> The orga (in general) checks this, but it is better to have
> people responsible to this important task.
Well, obviously, but adding another team assumes that the people on that
team will have time to act, and these will be the same people you
rightly point out have real lives, so all this team seems likely to
achive is consuming a little more of their already precious time.
I think this is a symptom of a problem that is actually built into the
current delegation.
The delegation for the chairs only really provides one routinely usable
power: The power to rearrange teams
Maslow's hammer:
"if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"
So, any perceived problem will eventually result in the Chairs tinkering
with the team structures somehow.
I'm not aware of any cases where this has proven particularly
worthwhile, whereas we have several examples of it being quite
destructive.
We should stop doing this to ourselves now.
The other (more exceptional) power that the chairs have to interfere
with day-to-day affairs is also problematic: overriding decisions
While this is only used rarely, the fact it exists undermines the
authority of those that really ought to have the right to make
day-to-day decisions.
It also encourages people to think of all decisions as being
provisional, which leads to interminable discussion.
It would be much more healthy for the DPL's delegates to have the right
to give their blessing to the leader(s) that naturally emerge each year,
and in-extremis to withdraw that blessing if poor decisions are being
made and advice rejected, but not the right to override individual
decisions.
If we remove these damaging components from the from the delegation,
what are we left with?
Something very much akin to the role of Non-Executive Directors in the
corporate world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-executive_director
That being the case, I think the DPL should cancel the current "Chairs"
delegation, and replace it with a "Non-exec" delegation (feel free to
come up with a better name for the role - "Chairs" doesn't really fit).
Then the people actually attempting to make the current conference
happen could be free to establish team structures that actually suit the
task in hand (obviously learning from the past) without having the
feeling of arbitrary change being imposed from on-high.
They would also have the power that goes with the responsibility that
they have taken on, which will result in significantly less angst than
in previous years.
Cheers, Phil.
P.S. This is not a criticism of the brave people who have taken on the
role of Chairs -- the fact that the problems persist despite a rotation
of personel proves to me that the fault lies with the role itself.
--
|)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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