thl: What I want in a chair

Axel Thimm Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
Wed Apr 25 09:37:43 UTC 2007


On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 06:26:12PM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> The chair should be responsible to do the boring tasks that often nobody
> else does otherwise.

That's OK.

The following is not.

> [which sometimes needs to happen in private], [person for non-public
> contact]

"Too many secrets", what happend to Fedora's original leitmotiv of
full transparency? Sure, some things are discussed in PM, but defining
a role as such and even twice? I would go the opposite direction and
define the chair as accounting to the committee and asking the
committee for any stealth operations.

> The chair for his job shouldn't have much special powers. Only some
> might be needed to "herd the cats. One of those areas are IMHO votings:

Wow, not much special powers, but he decides on when what gets voted?

> the recent wiki votings IMHO have shown that coordination and
> informations is needed before the voting starts;

No.

These votings have shown that there were two items that you personally
objected against over two months and did all that was in your power to
avoid getting it to a vote. These items even made us have a steering
committee from your preferred "we decide on consensus"-model (so it
really is an irony, that originally you supported an anarchy-model and
now you push to a presidency model), so we could finalize them with a
vote. But you continued to block voting and raising bars, producing
semi-technical arguments until finally the votes had the outcome you
desired.

So, will such a powerful chairman manage this better? From your POV,
if you get elected to be the chair, certainly, from my POV it will
become even more difficult to get anything voted lest even to have a
vote pass. Last time we needed two months to get to the vote, what
will it be with a Thorsten as solely empowered to issue votings? Two
years? No, thanks.

I think the very bad handling of these votes show that we need a more
democratic and open system where everyone in the committee (or even
the SIG) can issue votings, not that a chairman can block these to his
liking.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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