Lessons Learned

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 18:34 -0400, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> 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.

Small caveat.  Yes, those people (and many others) kick butt at doing.
Yes, respecting those who Do Things is excellent.  Yes, it works.  I
have no concerns with anything that has been done, nor do I see any
immediate cause for change.  I want to make it clear that I see no
current problem that needs fixing.

The only issue that arises out of this is that there are two categories
of Doers.  One includes all those people you mentioned.  The other
includes people like me, or Dennis, or Thorsten.  Namely people paid to
work on Fedora and people that aren't.

And to be honest, I feel it puts the people that are paid to work on
Fedora in an unfair position.  They are tasked with getting things done
in Fedora _and_ making sure the community is involved.  And at times
involving the community slows things down simply because the volunteers
aren't available during the day.  So now you have the interesting
situation where the paid Doers can literally accomplish more than the
rest of the group and therefore in a meritocracy they have an advantage
of being more valuable.

As I said earlier, I personally have no issues at the moment.  It's just
something we should keep in our minds while we move forward in our brave
new world.

josh