also sprach Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.cx> [2004.07.17.1904 +0200]: > Please, stop pushing the absolute democracy. We are not all > equals. We have never been, we will never be - unless we become > quite a boring and useless project. Well, I concur in large part with your well written words. Debian is not a democracy, and no, true democracies basically don't exist. And if we want to stick with the term meritocracy, fine by me. I am grateful to see skilled and capable people in positions in which they excel. My main beef is not with the structure or the delegates themselves, I simply do not like the closed nature of some of these meritocracies. Having acquired quite some experience in risk management over the past year, I find it rather disturbing that Debian is more or less redundant on the distribution side, but the actual organisation is not redundant. It's somewhat macabre to consider accidents and deaths, but in business, you have to deal with those possibilities in advance or suffer massive hits. I am on the advisory council of a Germany-based, middle-sized company with 24 production branches all over the world[0]. For every key position, we keep a replacement person and part of the job of someone holding a key position is to continuously keep the replacement up to speed. In case of an accident, the company will not loose significant time before moving forward again at old pace. I know of large companies where even the replacements have replacements. Such is the way it works. Debian is not comparable to a middle-sized company in size or strategy, but the global and decentral nature of the project, IMHO, call for the same approach. While some positions are held by groups anyway, I find it important that the position itself remains not a mystery to others. Granted, someone who is willing and capable to dig through the intricacies will make a good and dedicated occupant of the position later. But at the same time, that's not the only indicator, and someone skilled and enthusiastic may be shyed (sp?) away by the learning curve and lack of assistance. In addition, Debian is a meritocracy just as much as a company is a meritocracy. Programmers are programmers because they are good at programming; accountant are accountants ... and so on. But no matter how good you are at your job, a company will request periodic reports from you. While some delegates write a report (only) once a year (hint, hint), others have never. Thus, they become like those guys that work in the cellar, the mysterious folks unapproachable by those whose contributions are equally important to the company/project. So yes, meritocracy. But also: we need more information about the stuff going on in the basement. 0. Yes, I am young. No, I am not on the council because they need me. Yes, I am on the council because it really interests me. -- Please do not CC me when replying to lists; I read them! .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org> : :' : proud Debian developer, admin, and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system Invalid/expired PGP subkeys? Use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver!
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