On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 08:27:10AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> I read in your platform that you would like to have core teams of “at least
> three members plus assistants”. However this does not take activity into
> account. How will you manage with inactive core team members ?
Activity/inactivity it's very hard to measure in absolute terms: one
might be idle in general, than be active once per month and in that
spike fix problems which have been outstanding for years.
My best answer to this is that I'll deal with that on a case by case
basis. If a team is providing a good service to the project and (most
important) not blocking the work of other people in the project, I see
no real problem in having some inactive people on board. If OTOH I will
realize (e.g. because someone brings that to my attention) that a team
is blocking the work of others, apparently due to inactivity of his
members, I'll consider it as if it were understaffed. As usual, note
that realizing a team is understaffed is not enough to actually re-staff
it; the latter obviously need volunteers willing to take on their
shoulder the responsibility of the job that needs to be done.
On this topic, I also generally agree with a point made by Lars
elsewhere [1] about team rotation, but IME enforcing a scheme like that
one won't be easy. Most teams in Debian work in very informal ways,
delegates teams are no exceptions. Chiming in those team starting to
"impose" rotations won't be well received, and I really cannot blame
them; also merely proposing new members is a very delicate task IME. In
fact, I think that one of the very few valid reasons to interfere with
teams is when they are blocking the work of others within the project,
as that it's at odd with do-ocracy. I wonder if others have suggestions
on how to gradually move to rotation based schemes "gently" ...
Cheers.
[1] http://blog.liw.fi/posts/dpl-2011/
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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