Re: Question to all candidates: rotation on positions of power
Hi Charles
On 2022/03/16 14:28, Charles Plessy wrote:
thank you for running !
I have a question for you (and only you).
Yay, thanks for the question!
What do you think of the reform of the Technical Committee that
introduced a limit to the time people can serve in, and would you
consider applying a similar policy to other positions of power in
Debian?
For the Technical Committee, this seems to have worked well so far.
Currently all the Officers in Debian (not sure if that would fit your
definition of people in power) do have expiring terms, DPL and and
Secretary are both annual, and CTTE as per your example (Officers are
listed out on https://www.debian.org/intro/organization)
I also think that when we re-structure DAM and CT (or whatever form that
will take), that they should also be brought into the officers section.
Should we vote for the members that fill the role that DAM/CT fills now?
I can't give you a concrete answer there, but at least if we as a
community don't approve about how well someone performs on there, then
we're not stuck with them forever. For DAM/CT I think we'll have more
answers once we've spent a lot more time on this topic.
For some teams with lots of power, having a strict term limit might also
be a bad idea, since you sometimes really want the skills of the people
who have been around for a while. For this, I really like the FTP
Masters do, they seem to be the only delegation who have different tiers
of members, ie. FTP Masters, FTP Assistants and FTP Wizards. The FTP
Wizards seem like a good way to keep some valuable people around for
their historical knowledge.
So to answer your question on whether I would consider applying a
similar policy to these other positions, yes, certainly! I think expiry
is one of the available tools we can use to make teams/delegations
better. Voting is another, and tiered memberships yet another. There's
probably a lot that we can explore, but I don't think this is best
driven by the DPL, it needs to come from the teams and from the project
members. Unfortunately, after two terms, I think any prospective DPL who
thinks that they'll have time to actively drive all of this by
themselves is in for some disappointment.
So to further answer your question, I think we need some cultural shift
to spend some dedicated (ideally in-person) time on project structure
and procedures, so that DDs who care about various topics can come up
with suggestions and then either the DPL rubber stamps it or we have a
GR where necessary. To some degree I think this is happening, we're just
in our second GR in recent months to make changes to our voting process,
and we have a somewhat understandably (considering how much is happening
right now) stalled discussion on the future of DAM/CT too, which I'm
sure will pick up again, for those teams, I think that's the right time
and place to figure out something that would work as best possible for
everyone.
I'm sorry for being a bit long-winded here, if it doesn't answer your
question, then please shout :)
-Jonathan
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