On Nov 5, 2009, at 3:26 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
I pointed out to Keith on IRC a while ago that it was simply impossible for the board to "break the rules" since we have never had any rules. He has kindly suggested a possible set of such rules and I think that is a good starting point for a discussion.
In the page in the blog I have added some links to the rules or organizations of other Free Software projects. Most other project have no rules that I could find and even these are pretty informal.
Given that our community is pretty small, that elections are frequent (every 12 months) and that re-elections are very common (most of the current board was part of the previous one), I don't think most of the proposed rules would help very much. I'll make a brief comment on each one:
I generally agree with your interpretation/comments on items 1-8.
- There should be a grievance procedure and an equal opportunities
policy including disability awareness
I didn't attempt to paraphrase this because I didn't understand it.
This seems to be two different points (let's call them 9a and 9b though they should probably really be 9 and 10):
9a) a grievance procedure when someone feels that the preceding terms have been violated
9b) I *think* he's talking about the Board having some sort of obligation to attempt to work with limitations of individual contributors. Keith made reference several times that he was unable to take one (or more) course(s) of action being suggested (in IRC) and at least a couple of board members *seemed* to understand what he was referring to (either that or they were taking his response at face value)
The intent of these appears to be to have the Board make accommodations to the needs of individual contributors and to provide some sort of recourse to contributors should they believe that things aren't being handled properly at a finer level of granularity than 'wait for the next election cycle'.
One thing that Keith mentioned, a "vote of no confidence" followed by an ad hoc election, didn't get included in this list. Without that I don't see what the answer could be to "what happens if the rules get broken?"
I think a lot of that was/is the result of how the situation was handled.
Given that the next election is at most 12 months away and that any ad hoc election would probably pick the exact same board that was just kicked out, I am against such a rule. But without it, none of the others "have any teeth".
I would be happy with general principals rather than rules, and the board has previous tried to define that:
http://squeakboard.wordpress.com/our-mission/
-- Jecel
I agree that adding a lot of mandatory process and rules probably wouldn't have changed the outcome of this, or future, situations.
Direction can change for any number of reasons (priorities, contributors, pressures internal/external, etc.) and when it does, just have an open and inclusive dialog about what and why things need to change. Also, communicating ahead of time with any impacted parties, publicly or privately, would be a *very* good idea. Those seemed to be the key things missing here as it appeared arbitrary, and frankly, rather cold in how it was carried out. One can get away with that approach in a business where (presumably) people are being compensated to put up with it. In a volunteer arrangement, not so much.
I appreciate this open discussion taking place. If nothing else, it is a worthwhile exercise to discuss Keith's proposal and see what, if any, changes people would like to see made in light of recent events.
Phil
I was in the process of giving up. I wasn't particularly active on the lists, but I didn't see anything happening either. The Pharo guys were kicking ass and taking names, and the main Squeak group were muttering amongst themselves without a release or even an update stream in sight.
When the announcement that there was going to be a trunk repository and a contrib repository was made, I suddenly had hope again. The fact that there was a two-man release team that I didn't even know about (being a noob, I guess) didn't make a whit of difference to me, because they weren't shipping anything.
It's gravy now. I *love* clicking on the update button, and waiting for something to break. Monticello still kinda sucks, but we'll fix that eventually. The future is wide open and all that glitters is gold.
Now we just need an MIT image.
REAL ARTISTS SHIP
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Phil (list) pbpublist@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 5, 2009, at 3:26 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
I pointed out to Keith on IRC a while ago that it was simply impossible for the board to "break the rules" since we have never had any rules. He has kindly suggested a possible set of such rules and I think that is a good starting point for a discussion.
In the page in the blog I have added some links to the rules or organizations of other Free Software projects. Most other project have no rules that I could find and even these are pretty informal.
Given that our community is pretty small, that elections are frequent (every 12 months) and that re-elections are very common (most of the current board was part of the previous one), I don't think most of the proposed rules would help very much. I'll make a brief comment on each one:
I generally agree with your interpretation/comments on items 1-8.
- There should be a grievance procedure and an equal opportunities
policy including disability awareness
I didn't attempt to paraphrase this because I didn't understand it.
This seems to be two different points (let's call them 9a and 9b though they should probably really be 9 and 10):
9a) a grievance procedure when someone feels that the preceding terms have been violated
9b) I *think* he's talking about the Board having some sort of obligation to attempt to work with limitations of individual contributors. Keith made reference several times that he was unable to take one (or more) course(s) of action being suggested (in IRC) and at least a couple of board members *seemed* to understand what he was referring to (either that or they were taking his response at face value)
The intent of these appears to be to have the Board make accommodations to the needs of individual contributors and to provide some sort of recourse to contributors should they believe that things aren't being handled properly at a finer level of granularity than 'wait for the next election cycle'.
One thing that Keith mentioned, a "vote of no confidence" followed by an ad hoc election, didn't get included in this list. Without that I don't see what the answer could be to "what happens if the rules get broken?"
I think a lot of that was/is the result of how the situation was handled.
Given that the next election is at most 12 months away and that any ad hoc election would probably pick the exact same board that was just kicked out, I am against such a rule. But without it, none of the others "have any teeth".
I would be happy with general principals rather than rules, and the board has previous tried to define that:
http://squeakboard.wordpress.com/our-mission/
-- Jecel
I agree that adding a lot of mandatory process and rules probably wouldn't have changed the outcome of this, or future, situations.
Direction can change for any number of reasons (priorities, contributors, pressures internal/external, etc.) and when it does, just have an open and inclusive dialog about what and why things need to change. Also, communicating ahead of time with any impacted parties, publicly or privately, would be a *very* good idea. Those seemed to be the key things missing here as it appeared arbitrary, and frankly, rather cold in how it was carried out. One can get away with that approach in a business where (presumably) people are being compensated to put up with it. In a volunteer arrangement, not so much.
I appreciate this open discussion taking place. If nothing else, it is a worthwhile exercise to discuss Keith's proposal and see what, if any, changes people would like to see made in light of recent events.
Phil
Ronald Spengler wrote:
When the announcement that there was going to be a trunk repository and a contrib repository was made, I suddenly had hope again. The fact that there was a two-man release team that I didn't even know about (being a noob, I guess) didn't make a whit of difference to me, because they weren't shipping anything.
There was actually a one man release team (Matthew for 4.0) and another two man release team (Keith and Matthew for 3.11), and though they both were very busy with other things in their lives I think the board's position (which I fully agreed with) that the relicensing was the priority and new development would complicate it was the main cause of the seeming lack of progress in Squeak. And I actually looked at the archives of the Pharo mailing list at the time and compared it with the number of entries on Mantis and found out that though they seemed very different, the level of activity in both projects was comparable.
Unfortunately, appearance can matter more than reality. The *right* thing for the board to have done would be to talk to Matthew and Keith about the new direction, have a final vote in the following meeting and then announce it here. Letting Keith find out with everybody else was bad, so I see where the scheme explained by Phil would come in. But my impression at the time was that two weeks of silence on squeak-dev (to wait for the next board meeting) would cause lots of people to leave and they might not later hear about the new process and decide to come back. So I voted we do the wrong thing instead (the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and that sort of thing) and still stand by that decision.
I can't imagine some higher authority defending a developer from the board even if this episode shows the need for something like that. So the alternative is to complain about anything you don't like here on squeak-dev. That has been done and even though there seemed to be no immediate results it might have an effect (or not) in the next election.
-- Jecel
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org