Debian Accounts Manager - Master or Servant?

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Sat, Jan 13, 2001 at 11:10:32AM +0100, Martin Schulze wrote:
> Once important tasks are done and no other problems with new
> applicants occur they will be accepted and receive their account.

The problem with statements like this, Joey, is that you have no right 
at all to make them.

if you're not willing to fulfil your duties in creating new maintainer
accounts as they get approved by the NM team, then please step down and
make room for someone who is.

remember that your position as Accounts Manager for debian is a
delegation of responsibility to you - the role is to be a servant of
the organisation with duties to perform, not a master with the right to
unilaterally make policy decisions such as "new maintainer is closed".

you did the same thing about 18 months ago. you announced that you were
closing New Maintainer.  One of the excuses/reasons you gave was that it
was too much work.

then, as now, that sparked off a huge flame-war covering pretty much
the same issues as now.

ok, eventually we (actually mostly Dale, and some others) worked through
that and came up with a great new system for processing New Maintainer
applications.

problem solved, you might think.

unfortunately, no....because you are being the same bottle-neck in the
process as you were last time. you've effectively kept for yourself veto
power over any new maintainers joining debian.

this is unacceptable for any supposedly democratic organisation. it's
even more unacceptable for an organisation like debian which claims to
be the only truly open-source distribution - we're open source because
anyone can join in and be part of it. that's the theory, anyway...too
bad it's not allowed to work that way in practice.

now, are you willing to do the job that you volunteered to do?  

if not, will you get out of the way and refrain from obstructing other
volunteers(*) who ARE willing to perform those duties?



(*) preferably we should have a group of half-a-dozen or so Accounts
Managers. like the ftp archives, this is too important to leave in just
one or two hands.

craig

--
craig sanders