Re: Technical committee resolution
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 06:28:26PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> Any tech ctte member worth their salt would be involved in Debian
> >> beyond maintaining packages (if for nothing else to demonstrate they
> >> are qualified to be tech ctte members).
>
> > I would think that in a project with 1000 alleged active members, we
> > could easily limit privileged access to one instance per person
> > without any serious problems.
>
> We could. We could also choose quite another set of silly
> criteria to limit various and sundry things by. The question is, why?
> Why one? A better criteria is not to limit oneself by arbitrary number
> games, but see where the maximal benefit to the project lies. If one
> person has the time or energy to manage one hundred hats, and do a
> better job of them than other candidates, why deprive the project due
> Clint's law of pointless limitations?
How do you know where the *maximal* benefit to the project lies, if so many
paths to benefit are never explored?
How do you know that one person has the time or energy to manage N hats? Or,
how do you know that we wouldn't actually improve their performance in N-M
tasks if we take away M unnecessary tasks? How would you really know that
they are doing a better job than other candidates when there is an inherent
general limit imposed on the number of seats, and when there are
circumstantial advantages of some candidates, all of which gives some people
more chance to prove their worth over others and/or limits other people from
showing what they can do?
Yet, if you deprive those who want N hats of the possibility, they might get
lost completely. Or taking away M tasks won't have a positive effect, but a
negative one. Even worse, it might not have a straightforward effect, so we
might not be able to clearly decide if it was right or wrong.
And if we don't utilize the circumstantial advantages such as specific
experience in a task, we risk wasting too much time rehashing issues that
had already been dealt with in the past.
All these unwieldy circumstances make the decision on the criteria a matter
of judgement.
And speaking of judgement - his proposition was to reconsider some rules
based on a few data points, and it was reasonably mild and open-ended.
Yet you dismissed it as silly, arbitrary and pointless - all much stronger
words than his. IMO, people on whose judgement we depend on to make
important decisions for the Project as a whole should put more emphasis on
trying to understand other people's perspective than on engaging in an
antagonistic debate. And again, whether that opinion of mine is relevant
is a matter of judgement for the observers...
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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