Hello,
What do you think of the dunc-tank initiative ? What do you think are the result of the "experiment" ?
I think we should have been able to see the outcome before trying it.The idea itself is not a bad one, however during the entire course of the experiment it was never questioned by the proponents that we should go through with it. Declaring it an experiment did not have the desired effect of magically creating a lab environment without connection to the outside world, so a bit of risk assessment would have been in order.
The result is that in the future, we should be more cautious when implementing project-wide changes. As expected, having someone work full-time on the release brings us nearer to that goal, so I wouldn't entirely disregard the idea of organizing funding for individual developers, however any such endeavor needs to be in line with how Debian actually works and not expect a cultural shift to happen.
Simon