Re: veto?

[koanhead <koanhead@riseup.net>]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2014 13:20:01 +0100, zlatan wrote:
 
> We need less and not more layers of governance/'political' complexity in
> project. Lets stop acting like government  and more like community.
> 

When you have a small number of people involved in a 'community' then you 
can get by with little governance. This requires that each member have a 
reliable mental model of identities and interactions within the group, so 
as to track the member's own responsibilities to and expectations of 
other members. In communities up to Dunbar's number[1] plus-or-minus some 
unknown error bar probably smaller than Dunbar's number, this works fine. 
As community size increases beyond that point it starts to break down.

Debian has more than 1000 developers, thousands of other contributors, 
and hundreds of thousands or even millions of users. All of these have 
some stake in decisions that the project makes. Debian is long past the 
point where everyone in the project can know everyone else. Politics is 
just another tool. Talk about politics (as opposed to political talk) is 
also technical discussion.

More or less governance is never the answer to political problems. The 
answer is _better_ governance. 




[1] Not a specific number. Thought by anthropologists to be about 250 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number