On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 06:10:28PM +0000, Martin Michlmayr wrote: > * Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> [2004-03-09 00:57]: [...] > I certainly hope that people will ask themselves whether I have been > productive as DPL. The following questions you raised are all valid, > and they are questions I have constantly asked myself throughout the > year in order to measure my performance. Okay. What were your answers? > > In summary, the biggest difference between Martin and me is that he > > has had a year to demonstrate his efficacy as DPL. > > I would go a step further and also ask how much Branden has achieved > of what he wrote in his platforms in the last years, and how much of > this has been done by others in the meantime (not necessarily DPLs). Rather than doing things which might be perceived as undermining your authority, or paying disrespect to the will of the electorate (despite the very close results), I decided to engage in a practical demonstration of how I would achieve greater openness, communication, and collaboration, by first applying these principles to my own work in maintaining XFree86 for Debian. I suspect the significance of this action was not at all lost on you, since without the benefit of having seen my platform, you wasted no time in your own dismissing this work as completely irrelevant: Coordinating a project the size of Debian requires a very different set of skills than maintaining a large package, such as glibc.[1] ...or XFree86, the reader is surely invited to infer. > > I'm not running against my perceptions of Martin Michlmayr in 1998; I > > think it's only fair if he would do me the courtesy of offering > > compelling reasons he is preferable to Branden Robinson in 2004, not > > Branden Robinson in 1998. > > My comments were about Branden Robinson in 2004, not the one in 1998. > I fully acknowledge that, for example, your communication has > significantly improved over the years. Most of my arguments, however, > are about personality; that is, skills which are hard to acquire. Style of communication is not a personality trait? How are we to draw conclusions about a person's personality if *not* through their words and actions? And if my communication skills have "significantly improved over the years", as you "fully acknowledge", how does it stand to reason that my personality has not changed? For that matter, if communication skills are completely decoupled from personality traits that are relevant to leadership, how are the voters to make an informed choice? People no more have the ability to read your mind than they do Gergely's or mine. Are you saying that I am an inferior candidate because I possess personality flaws that are not objectively demonstrable through my manner of communication? If people are to reject my "significantly improved" communication skills, and if they are to reject the skills it requires to to maintain a large package -- such as glibc or XFree86 -- what critera are the voters to use when evaluating us? Once you've eliminated what we say and what we do from consideration, the voters are left with who we are. > In my own case, I know that I'm a good coordinator by nature. I have > never been known for flamewars, and most people know me as > approachable, and know that I have always been this way. Okay. What I'm getting from this is basically that you were "born to lead" -- you've always been a great coordinator, "by nature", and that you have *always* been approachable. That's great -- honestly. But is it more valuable than being adaptable to the needs of the Debian Project? I think I've shown adaptation, and you and Anthony Towns seem to agree, for all your criticisms. If born leaders are more suited to lead Debian than home-grown ones who have been forged in the crucible of our social environment, then why do we require that the Debian Project Leader even be a Debian Developer in the first place[2]? Surely any leader with inherently desirable qualities will be able to get him- or herself up to speed with our organizational structure and challenges without having to have gone through an apprenticeship phase. Especially if that leader's most valuable trait is coordination: the initiatives are executed by others, while the leader's role is simply in putting the right people together. > Furthermore, partly in line with AJ said, while your communication has > significantly improved, I wonder why it had to improve in the first > place? Well, that's rather obvious -- because it wasn't optimal in the first place. It was a lesson I had to learn, and I think I learned it. I continue to learn, every day -- as I think we all do if we keep our inherent fallibility as human beings in mind. What I'm hearing from you is that Debian Project Leadership is not a position that is best earned -- it is best anointed upon those who have the most desirable innate qualities. Why is it a problem if my communication skills *had* to improve, as long as they have done so? Moreover, why does it *matter* why those skills had to improve? Shall I be disqualified to serve as DPL essentially due to inherited traits? Maybe so. But I don't believe at present that that's the way the Debian Project does work, or should work. It's not the kind of system I think of when I hear the word "meritocracy" -- to me, it's more like "aristocracy". [1] http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/platforms/tbm [2] http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution (section 5.2.3) -- G. Branden Robinson | Notions like Marxism and Debian GNU/Linux | Freudianism belong to the history branden@debian.org | of organized religion. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Noam Chomsky
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