Voting rights - the GNOME way

[Lauri Watts]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Saturday 23 November 2002 17.23, Harri Porten wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, Navindra Umanee wrote:
> > Like Vadim, as soon as you start talking about elections, I have bad
> > nightmares!  Let's please not turn into a political circus like the
> > Debian project or the GNOME Foundation...
>
> Do you have personal experience with either of them ? I'd be curious learn
> about them.

Not GNOME or debian, but FreeBSD has some elected management in place.

I could explain myself, but they already have it all in a doc.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/

This is *really* worth reading though, and has a lot of things that I think 
would be valuable for KDE.  Dispute procedures when someone commits to code 
you consider yourself maintainer for, timeouts when the "maintainer" of 
something has gone missing in action, and you want to make a change, so that 
code doesn't become pseudo-abandoned, things like that.

I especially like section 9 "The FreeBSD committers big list of rules" which 
isn't really all that big.

As far as actual "interference" in day to day matters or micro management, I 
can't remember when the core team last pulled out any of the big guns they're 
given, and you rarely hear from them "as core" although the members are 
active and well respected developers in their own right.  That's important, I 
think, that "woohoo, i'm a member of core" attitude is just something you 
don't really see around FreeBSD.  It also means, when they speak as a group, 
they are to be taken seriously.

FreeBSD is rather tougher to get a CVS account, than it is in KDE, but nowhere 
near as tough as debian.  You need to find a mentor, someone who will commit 
your initial patches, and when you reach the point where they feel 
comfortable with it, you get an account of your own, although for a sort of a 
trial period your mentor gets just as blamed as you do if you screw up (so 
that your mentor won't be abandoning you) and then when everyone is happy, 
you're a full blown committer.  

We've used a similar procedure within KDE for the Documentation committers for 
quite a long time, and it's worked fine.  Docs aren't too CVS friendly, it's 
terribly easy to break the build with a typo, and our group of contributors 
tend to be less technically savvy and comfortable with CVS, at least 
initially.  

I can't recall a single person ever complaining that they didn't get an 
account the very second they volunteered, and frankly, if everyone who 
volunteered or made one document did get a CVS account, there'd be another 
200 unused CVS accounts by now.

Regards,
- -- 
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation: http://i18n.kde.org/doc/
KDE on FreeBSD: http://freebsd.kde.org/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (FreeBSD)

iD8DBQE939rW/gUyA7PWnacRAk6nAJ9jpjRtVZ8I7/5t+7jySVw2joIV6QCfdyro
fH2jyVKgxJnbYzXXwpPS69U=
=vGbO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----