On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 02:50:42PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> "Bernhard R. Link" <brlink@debian.org> writes:
>
> > But if there is such an situation and there is heated disagreement
> > outside of this body, how would having only one side of that in the body
> > help? That would only make a body supposed to defuse such a situation to
> > be weapon for one side and thus could even rise such a problem to much
> > higher spheres.
>
> It depends. Being able to reach consensus may make it easier for the
> soc-ctte to look at the situation and go "there's strong disagreement here
> and even if we're mostly on one side, we realize that and we should decide
> that we can't really intervene." I don't know if that's more likely or
> less likely with a group of people who work well together but may be
> mostly or entirely on one side of an issue, or with a group of people who
> are representative but don't work well together.
Both points are very valid: we need a representative committee (if it
should do mediation, at least), and we also need people who can work
well together. Luckily, these are not exclusive properties. :-)
> Try this reduction of my worry (which may be very unlikely): Suppose we
> have two basic factions in Debian, one that thinks the soc-ctte is a good
> idea, and one that thinks it's a horrible idea. If you have proportional
> representation of both sides, that means you should elect a few people to
> the soc-ctte who think it's a horrible idea and should never do anything.
> If those people act to represent their constituency, they should try to
> block any action by the soc-ctte on any topic.
I do not think this must follow from the situation. First of all,
whether or not the social committee is a good idea is not the sort of
conflict I would expect the social committee to solve (aside from the
fact that they're obviously a party in the conflict), because this is a
very technical thing. Good candidates who work well together should set
aside their opinions on this when they are working on something for the
committee. If they don't then we might have a case for the committee
("He doesn't do any of the work he's elected for, I hate him for that").
But for the moment I'll expect that this will not happen. :-)
> I'm not saying that the above is the specific problem that I'm worried
> about. It's rather just a useful simple reduction of the sort of conflict
> that could happen over other things, and since it's so absolute, it's
> easier to reason about.
A better example (IMO) would be if half the developers are fed up with
the Cabal(tm), while the other half says it doesn't exist. We can have
the situation that a supposed member of the Cabal (who of course claims
it doesn't exist) is also a member of the social committee. Now what
happens when a conflict about Cabalism must be handled?
This may result in tensions between the supposedly-Cabal-member and the
Cabal-haters in the committee. But they don't necessarily break down
the entire committee. At least on technical grounds there is agreement
AFAIK (there should be no Cabal), and that may make things easier.
Anyway, I think this example is not very realistic either, but I thought
it'd be good to try to show what sort of things I think will be the
biggest problems of the committee.
> As mentioned, I'm very leery of this sort of situation for personal
> reasons and it may be that I'm just way too conservative about not
> creating these sorts of tensions among working groups. It may just not be
> a problem. It may be that the people who get elected via whatever means
> to the soc-ctte will all be people who can get along with others even if
> they disagree sharply and who know how to keep disagreements from
> escalating. That would be great.
I think we should certainly try to find a voting method which makes
electing such a team more likely. But it mustn't come at the cost of
representation.
Thanks,
Bas
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