Re: Committee Role: Helping build the debconf-team
Hi Sam,
Am 15.11.19 um 12:40 schrieb Sam Hartman:
Daniel, can I see if I'm understanding you correctly?
you're saying that the way you want to see things run is that each year
we pick a different people to form a team who are guiding the conference.
Every year a team has formed as part of the bidding process and they are
that (winning) team. They usually attract more members during the year
before their DebConf (and may loose a few). But since about forever we
have looked at the bidding team with the view of whether it is strong
and diverse enough to stand a good chance of delivering a great DebConf.
They get to have creativity, and within oversight of the project, the
DebConf community and the DCC this team gets to have wide latitude.
ack
Year to year there are more or less members of this team who are at the
host city. There probably do need to be members of this team in the
host country. (It's possible to run conferences without people in the
host country but those conferences cost at least an order of magnitude
more than a DebConf to put on in my experience.)
ack
We've often been calling this the local team.
The local team may be able to recruit volunteers from the broader
DebConf community to do some tasks.
Ultimately though, this yearly selected team is responsible for putting
on the whole conference, either by doinga task themseles, finding
volunteers to do that task, or not doing the task.
ack
The advantage you see in this system is that we get to try new things,
it's not the same old DebConf.
We get a different grou of people each year who can take ownership.
We get rotation.
ack. We also get new members for the global teams because some former
organizers are continuing in one or more teams that transcend years.
The disadvantage is that this team may have more or less resources from
the broader community. Timezone, communication skills, interpersonal
factors, burnout, political situations (think choice of country), and
phase of moon effect this.
ack. And this is where the DCC tries to find people to fill in.
Assuming a bid is strong but nobody can do a specific role and they have
no idea, whom to ask, we'll try to help find somebody.
But a bid team that does not cover - say - managing the venue
relationship, visa or fundraising would (currently) not be likely to win
a bid.
If I am understanding you correctly
LOCAL TEAM IS A HORRIBLE NAME!!!
full ack. The chairs before DCC times tried to change that moniker but
.. it still stuck.
https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Teams/
"It's expected that people that are local to one conference will
participate actively in the organization. There is no specific team for
this, as they should distribute themselves across the teams, while
having their own internal organization".
[..]
It sounds like you're saying that since content is kind of essential to
a Debconf, he (or the team putting together the bid) needs to have a
plan for content.
It can be to do it themselves.
But it could also be to think about who did a great job of content in
the past and see if they will join the "local team." to handle that.
This is how I got to be local team for DebConf16. Not because of content
in my case but because of contribution to other teams that my friends
from South Africa wanted to retains similarly for their conference.
It is common to have a few local team members that are very-non-locally
residing. Often expats or people connected in other ways to the country
and/or team.
Except that with a name like local team, people aren't going to think
that way, especially if this is their first DebConf bid.
Ack. Practically that is a bit less of a problem as we don't have bids
from people that have no previous connection to DebConfs. The bids are
coming from the existing DebConf / Debian community. But the name stays
misleading.
Again, this all assumes I am understanding you correctly.
You got me quite well. FTR: I don't think the organization structure is
ideal but as you can see in the old wiki link pasted above other
(better?) ideas have not found traction. And in a volunteer based
organization top-down organizational changes are hard.
If I am, better names might include:
* guiding team
* The 2019 team (for the 2019 conference)
Would that potentially make people feel excluded that help that 2019
team in 2019, but are not 2019 team?
* The bidding team
We use bid team for, well, teams that bid to run a DebConf in their country.
But it also sounds like we want to emphasize the recruiting people from
all around the wold as part of putting together the bid.
It's possible this is all documented and that because I'm the kind of
person who reads docs, if I were more involved in DebConf I'd just know
it. And I'd find the name "local team" quaint kind of like how I find
not a typewriter errors quaint.
But for someone new, it's going to be confusing.
And for this job, it's going to be inherently new, so I think that
matters.
Ack. Clear communication, concise lingo is always beneficial.
https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebconfOrganizationWorkingGroup
is also good reading for background info.
I now leave you and Antonio to the interesting debate of whether this is
the model we want.
You know my pragmatism. I'm happy with any model that works.
Kind regards,
Daniel
Reply to: