Re: Debian Membership

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Matthew Johnson <mjj29@debian.org> writes:

> My goals with changing the membership procedures are:

[...]

> - To decouple of technical and political positions in the membership

For what it's worth, I disagree with this goal, assuming that I understand
what you mean by it.  I think that such a decoupling would be a
significant change in how we think of the project, and not one for the
better.

There are various ways you can structure a project, but the one that
Debian has chosen, for good and for ill, is that the people who do the
work get a vote.  It's not a perfect correlation, but it's fairly closely
linked.  Changing that would be a fairly significant change in project
governance, and I don't see much in the way of benefit.

We can certainly expand the definition of technical work that qualifies
for political voting membership and not focus it solely on packaging, but
I think we're doing reasonably well with the basic assumption that the
people who are voting on project direction are the same people who are
putting their own hard work into making that direction happen.  I think we
should maintain that assumption.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>