Lessons Learned

[Christopher Blizzard]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 12:56 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 3/20/07, Greg Dekoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> >
> > > Instead, Fedora has a leadership system, which is widely being ignored
> > > by the public, unless it interferes with individual contributor
> > > interests.
> >
> > Isn't that basically how governments work?
> >
> > The *real* question: when the Fedora leadership (government) interferes
> > with the interests of the individual contributor (citizen) -- which is, of
> > course, inevitable -- does the individual contributor (citizen) have
> > meaningful recourse?
> 
> That is one question you could ask. The other question you could ask
> is what tools government can use to convince the contributor to accept
> the interference, while still contributing.
> 
> The tools could include strong community norms/peer pressure; this is
> where Debian fails- their community norm is that you should discuss
> the thing to death. Everyone is afraid to say 'STFU and code, or STFU
> and go away.' There is no strong leadership which feels empowered to
> say 'OK, we've discussed it, discussion is done, we're acting now.'
> 
> Probably I'm overreacting about the specific issue of release dates
> (given my biases there). The core question I wanted to ask is how does
> Fedora say to contributors 'we love you, we love your ideas, but we
> apologize- we have to move on. So kindly please STFU so we can get on
> with our core business of _________.' Debian seems socially incapable
> of doing that; it would be a shame if in the name of
> democracy/deliberation Fedora went down the same route.

I honestly believe that Greg, Max, Jeremy, Jesse, and the other folks
who lead inside of the Fedora community are interested in building a
community of doing, not a culture of talking.  We respect those who Do
Things and encourage them.  Jesse, Jeremy, Mike McGrath are good
examples of this - they are lead-by-doing people and it works.

As to your specific suggestion about how to say to contributors 'we love
you...' I think that saying that in those words is fine.  I'm a tough
love kind of guy, so maybe I'm OK with saying it exactly like that is
fine as well. :)  But in reality, I feel it's about making sure the
culture we're building is based around that.  Doing, not talking.  "He
who codes, leads."  (Although sometimes we don't want the code, either,
but that's a different story.)

Here's another point.  We need to make sure we're being pretty practical
about governance models here.  We could go for the purist democracy
model or the pure fascism model or some other anarchist model, but what
we have right now - a combination of corporate interest balanced with
community contributions built around transparency and a culture of
getting things done - is working pretty damned well and I am loathe to
see it change at this point without a very very good reason.  Most of us
are honest enough and bright enough to see any abuses and point them
out, and that's part of the culture of transparency we all believe in.
So let's just keep to a "works well" model here and stay away from the
political hyperbole and learn to trust ourselves a bit.  We've
self-selected into a good bunch of people and that's our biggest
advantage - not the model.

--Chris