[ Sorry I've been silent recently. I had hoped to get to this while on holiday (last week), but it didn't quite happen. ] Martín Ferrari <tincho@debian.org> writes: > On 30/09/15 21:31, martin f krafft wrote: > >>> The problem with the workshop was that it was only communicated >>> when it was already arranged, rooms reserved, webpage prepared.. >>> And it was just a month before the conference started! > >> But again, you are mixing up your facts, Tincho. There was nothing >> arranged, nor rooms reserved. We had barely managed to prepare >> a webpage with many unknowns. > > I will quote your message from 14/7/15 (full text at [1]): > >> All of the organisation is independent of DebConf15 (i.e. finances >> are separate, we've booked a room with the hostel, etc.), but we're >> obviously hoping to advertise this in the context of DebConf15. > > If my understanding of English is not too broken, it says there that you > had already booked a room with the hostel. There was also a pretty much > finished webpage hosted on DebConf infrastructure, which can be seen in [2]. ... I served on the UK Unix User Group's council for 6 years, where we organised a couple of conferences a year, and whenever possible would precede them with a day of workshops. From that experience I can declare that such workshops work really very well, and should be a good fit for DebConf. While the announcement was a disaster, the underlying idea of workshops is very worthwhile -- we should do them every year if possible IMO. It is certainly not even slightly obvious that the idea constitutes a "serious risk" of the type mentioned in the delegation. However the severely critical responses from the Chairs, even if not written as an official Chair response, effectively vetoed it. I'd suggest that that is at odds both with the delegation, and with statements from the Chairs such as this one from you: > I want to point out that the current chairs' plan was to withdraw as > much as possible from the decision making process, It is clear from this that the Chairs (quite rightly) have no intention of being in charge. However, the use of the veto means that all decisions are rendered provisional, awaiting the Chairs potential displeasure -- this leaves no room for any proper leadership to emerge. You asked me in an earlier mail what I think should be done in the difficult cases. My answer is: There should be some person(s) "in charge". They should get to decide the difficult cases, not the Chairs. If they turn out to be evil, deranged, or useless, the Chairs are there to get rid of them, but if they're as motivated and brilliant as is our average conference leaders, let's just let them get on with it, without getting in their way unnecessarily. Perhaps you'd like to reflect on the cases where there were Chair interventions and highlight those (if any) that you think would have resulted in actual harm to the conference if left unchallenged. When the veto was invoked, which cases could instead have been dealt with via the "advice and sharing of experience" route that would still exist if the veto were not available? I think the current situation emboldens the wider team to criticise decisions which are not really important enough to waste everyone's time on. If instead we had a clearly defined leadership for each year's conference, such discussions would be re-framed as ones where the aim was to persuade that leadership, rather than simply assert a differing opinion. I think we should take more account of the corrosive effect that having even trivial decisions reversed has on morale. This collateral damage on morale seems to be missing from recent analysis by the Chairs. This touches on the matter: > Yes, the response was negative because of the way you handled it. I am > sorry you lost motivation, but that is not our fault. but seems to show very little value being assigned to the motivation of one of the key organisers, just before the conference. This is not the way to get the best out of people. We should do it differently in future. I'd suggest choosing someone we trust enough to run a conference (as, in effect, we do every year) and then ... trust them to run the conference. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| 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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