Re: Active policy editor
Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> writes:
> Alas, delegating, etc. is the easy part. In terms of recruiting, have
> you considered:
> * Emailing the debian-devel-announce list along the lines of "The
> Debian Policy team needs your help"? A generous description of
> a) the responsibilites, b) an encouragement that it's not a
> "scary" part of Debian, and c) clear & actionable steps if someone
> is tempted, would be essential here IMHO.
> * Reaching out to specific people you might think have the right
> temperament for the role? There might be some crossover with
> -ctte. They don't specifically need to be DDs (yet) and, indeed,
> this could be a great way to get someone started along those
> lines.
> These are not mutually exclusive of course. In fact, I was just about to
> email a couple of folks but if we had such a post to d-d-a I could
> underline and add some weight to request by linking to it with my
> message.
> Thoughts?
I would be very happy to have someone do the above.
It would make a ton of sense if I were the person to do that, but this is
where we run into the particular dynamics of my own lack of time and
energy, unfortunately.
As you all can tell, I get very spotty amounts of time to work on Debian
and therefore on Policy. When I do get some of that precious time, I
strongly prioritize the things I can do that maximize my sense of
accomplishment and unblocking people by doing things with immediate effect
and committing things to a repository. That sort of work (merging
patches, proposing text, organizing bugs) is soul-satisfying for me, and I
can do that without having a lot of social "juice" or energy.
Recruiting people, reaching out to people who would be good Policy folks
(alas, this has significant overlap with the people who are already way
too busy and have tons of other Debian responsibilities), handling the
replies, training people up on doing that work, and whatnot has a lot of
overlap with a fair chunk of my day job. My day job consumes pretty much
all my social energy doing that sort of coordination and discussion, so
when I reach the weekend and have some rare spare time for Debian, I have
very little energy for doing *that kind* of Debian work.
So, short version: I like working on Policy, want to keep working on
Policy, enjoy discussing technical tradeoffs, but really don't want to be
any sort of person manager or coordinator since that's the type of energy
I have the least of at the moment. :) I'm happy to sit over in my corner
and do my thing and coordinate enough with other people so that I don't
duplicate work or get in other people's way.
That also means I'm *totally* happy with someone else who wants to jump in
and do that part, and I also am not going to say no to anyone who wants to
help! Since I don't want to do that part of the work, I'm totally happy
to cede the authority to do so to someone else.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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