Conflict solving and maintainer

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Wednesday 08 December 2010, Pierre Stirnweiss wrote:
> I am very much in line with what Seb just said in his "philosophical
> hike"(c). And it would seem from the previous posts that the current
> maintainer bunch do not see themselves as application owners. 

That's definitely true for me, through I do feel some proprietary pride in Krita -- "This is it! we did this!"

> The later type
> of maintainers cannot apply to Calligra because it is not a one-man show
> anymore. First there are a huge amount of founding blocks which are shared,
> and second, noone can claim to own an application anymore. Even if the
> current bunch of maintainers are all in the same line of thoughts, I think
> it would still be a good idea to set the rule straight right at the
> begining. One never knows what the future is made of, and in a couple of
> years time some of the current maintainer might want to step down. It then
> would become very relevant that the overall culture of the project makes it
> clear what is expected of that role.
>
> I also like the citizenship list idea. 

Me too.

> In line with this, it perhaps is also
> a good idea to drop the name "maintainer" altogether. There are a lot of
> strings attached to the term "maintainer" which are not necessarily
> applicable here. Perhaps we could rename them as "facilitators".

Hm... "Facilitator" sounds a bit like I'll have to go round wearing a homburg hat, black shades and a gun with a silencer on it... The problem with using a different "job title" is that "maintainer" is used in the wider open source world, with all kinds of different meanings, but at least it's got some currency. 

> As for taking lessons from the past and conflict handling, I think that we
> should set straight away a mechanism of handling those problems. If we
> basically say, we will deal with them when the problems arise and set up
> something then, we would basically reproduce what already happened. The
> problems would be unhandled until it is too late. I think the biggest
> failure of the past was a lack of unanimously accepted way of setting
> unsolvable technical disagreement as well as a lack of set consequences for
> not respecting the community's decisions and rules (and that also includes
> the way people are behaving with others) and no mechanism to enforce this.
> I don't think we should be naive enough to think that from now on, there
> will never be disagreements which can't be solved between the parties. these
> should I think be extremelly rare occurences, but we should as a commnity be
> ready to handle them in a commonly accepted way, before they turn poisonous.

If we have a "citizen list" we can have votes, and I think we need to put all this down in a policy document indeed. Maybe not right now, though, I think we should discuss it at the first Calligra Sprint.