Decision making processes in KDE (?)

[Waldo Bastian]

On Saturday 30 November 2002 17:35, Matthias Welwarsky wrote:
> So, what do you think formalized decision processes would change? Nobody in
> KDE has any obligation to anything but KDE itself, and KDE is diffuse,
> without a clear outline or direction. So, anyone can make anything out of
> his dedication to the KDE project. Why would he obey any ruling, be it
> based on a voting, or on a dictatorship.

[snip]

> How would we force rivaling developers to obey a decision? How would you
> stop a Don Sanders from interfering with KMail development, given that the
> majority of votes decided so?

Some thoughts on this.

Debian formulates it nicely in his constitution:
  "Nothing in this constitution imposes an obligation on anyone to do work for
   the Project. A person who does not want to do a task which has been
   delegated or assigned to them does not need to do it. However, they must
   not actively work against these rules and decisions properly made under
   them."
[http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution]

You can force a developer to obey a decision in the sense that you can disable 
his access to KDE infrastructure when he actively starts to work against a  
decision. However, most of the time that's not necassery and most developers 
happily follow rules and guidelines based on peer-pressure alone.

In fact peer-pressure works very good if a) a decision/rule is clearly 
documentated and b) there is evidence that the decision/rule is supported by 
a large (majority?) part of the (KDE) community.

The benefits of a formalized decission process would be mainly in terms of 
these two factors IMO.

> So, there's the question of "Who votes?". There's no "We, the people".
> Based on what attributes would we decide who has the right to vote. CVS
> account? @kde.org email address? Number of bugs fixed since the last
> release? We have no established rules on how to get an account or a
> kde.org-email.

For that I think it is necassery to create some sort of criteria and then have 
some body (group of people) evaluating that criteria so that you get a 
well-defined group of eligible voters. I don't think having a @kde.org 
address or cvs account should be part of that criteria, that merily defers 
the decision to whoever gives out kde.org addresses / cvs accounts.

Now, if we call eligible voters "Registered KDE Contributors", then you can go 
from there and say that @kde.org addresses should only be given out to 
"Registered KDE Contributors".

As a criteria I was thinking something like "must have made considerable  
contribution to KDE in terms of labor, must support KDE social guidelines, 
must have shown commitment to KDE". And then you should clearify 
"considerable" a bit (e.g. more than a single patch) and the commitment part 
(e.g. made contributions over a period of at least 3 months)

Note that "Number of bugs fixed since the last release" is not part of that 
criteria, although a certain number of bugs fixed would certainly contribute 
to "considerable contribution" and "shown commitment".

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian@kde.org -=|[ SuSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian@suse.com