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Re: Announcing miniDebConf Montreal 2020 -- August 6th to August 9th 2020



On 19/02/20 at 23:17 -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> Hello Lucas,
> 
> Lucas Nussbaum dijo [Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 11:45:43AM +0100]:
> > > Most probably, the results will be announced by mail (and not
> > > communicated during a meeting), because the bid review process has led
> > > us to need to decide in this way. I cannot speak for the previously
> > > appointed DebConf Committee¹, but for the iteration I have been
> > > delegated for, I can promise you we will not hide problems™ — That is,
> > > once we choose, I can commit that we will not hide the reasoning
> > > behind our choice. Some of it will not be full-public, as -of course-
> > > it includes important human interaction bits, but all important points
> > > will be made public.
> > 
> > You kind-of make it sound like what you promise was not done by the
> > previous DC Committee. I'd like to point that details about the decision
> > process and the rationale were provided after the DC20 decision.
> 
> Yes. I think I can promise that, because I think the situation to be
> different to what it was a year ago. And I know I'm getting ahead of
> things; I do not want in any way to put pressure on the rest of the
> DCC on this account — But I think we will decide by consensus, not by
> voting. And that we can share the reasoning we are following.

[..]

> I acknowledge the decision and communication of it was quite harder
> last year than what we are facing now.

If the project has a problem with the level of transparency of the DCC,
I think that it should be improved in all cases, not just when the
decision is easier to make...

> I don't say that DC20's decision was "intended to keep something
> quiet" nor that "there's a truth that needs to come out". I can only
> comment on what I saw as an close-but-still-outsider. I know that the
> DC20 decision crosses many personal issues, and that explaining it
> thoroughly will likely hurt.

Honestly, I don't what there's left to explain. As stated in Stefano's
email, a number of points were made about issues with both bids; we
tried to decide by consensus but failed, because different members
assigned different levels of importance to those issues; and, after
ensuring that none of us would change our mind, we ended up voting.

If I look back, I have two regrets:

One is that we did not provide a rationale with the decision email.
Merging Stefano's email with the decision email might have improved
things slightly. On the other hand, all issues were discussed in public
before.

The other one is that our decision making process doesn't have an early
check that there aren't any big unsolvable issue with the bid. In some
sense, we ignore those Elephants until the final decision, which makes
it harder to reject a bid based on those Elephants because in the
meantime, we asked the bid team to do a lot of work on detail-level
issues.
We could have something like a "bid acceptability check", at the start of
the process, to detect, discuss and formally decide on Elephants early
on.
One way to achieve that could be to poll regular DebConf attendees about
the bid, to measure the proportion of those who would not attend such a
conference. (Historically, we had issues with DC13 (because camp), DC10
and DC14 (because US), and DC18 (because Brazil) at least -- I don't
remember if there were discussions about DC11 and DC16 but there could
have been.)

Lucas

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