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Followup to Jeroen's rebuttal



Jeroen wrote in his rebuttal:

> Again, though, I differ in the way how to achieve that: one cannot
> pull people actively, but instead, one must ensure Debian is a place
> where great things happen, and then people will come to Debian on their
> own. 

People do come to Debian on their own, but the problem is what do they do
then? Many people are fine and happy with being told "well, pick something
you think needs doing and do it", but that doesn't suit everybody --
others appreciate the direction of saying "this problem needs solving,
and here's how you can get started on it and who you should talk to,
please help!"

> [...] I'm a bit puzzled at what exactly Anthony proposes to do here,
> how he wants to achieve better recruiting. Getting people to be able to
> give up positions more easily doesn't magically generate new people to
> do the work.

Quoting what I said in my platform:

] I think there are a couple of questions we should be asking of ourselves:
] if other members of Debian have to step aside, are there areas I could
] step up to? And if I had to reduce my involvement in some area of Debian,
] is there someone who could step up to take over that work?
] 
] In many cases the answer to the second will limit the first -- many of
] us are already spending a lot of our free time on Debian, so the only way
] we could do more is by dropping something we already do, and if there's
] no one who'll take over that work, we might not be able to do that.

The issue isn't getting people who are already contributing to stop,
it's about making sure that we've got the flexibility to have people
working where they're needed -- making sure that we don't have old hands
stuck on a single tedious job, when other people could be doing it with
the result that the old hand is freed up to do other work, and the new
people get more experience and understanding in general.

The various "assistant" and "secretarial" roles we've developed are
good examples of this, and Joey's passing the SRM baton to the -volatile
manners will hopefully turn into another -- though the manner in which
that happened was far from the best. I think in general this is a process
we should pay attention to and encourage.

Cheers,
aj

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