leadership document

[Jared Norris]

On 20 May 2012 02:28, Karl Anliot <kanliot at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Ryan Porter
> <websterhamster at felton4h.net> wrote:
>> As I can't participate in the meeting (IRC is bloked by my parents), I
>> would like to vote here to follow the meritocratic governance structure
>> described at http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/debianleader.xml .
>>
>
> Allow me to point out, that in a meritocracy, only council members, or
> comitters (who have been approved by the council) get to vote.
>
>
> This is a long read, so be prepared.  Thanks to OSS Watch for
> providing a tutorial on how to write a governance document.  It
> formalizes the idea of "Elected Team Leaders" we've been tossing
> around on the mailing list.  I've made an effort to make it complete
> enough to vote on.
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/tempgovernance
>
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I will also most likely miss the meeting due to time zone issues.
Instead I thought I should probably add some information on the list
for people to take into consideration. Firstly, I understand those
that are doing the work should have the most say in anything and I
haven't been overly active myself in the team in recent times. That
being said I have seen open source teams go through change like the
Lubuntu team currently is so I don't want them to make the same
mistakes so hoping to give some constructive feedback.

Firstly, thanks Karl for taking the time to prepare the document. It
raises some good points for discussion and we need to start that
discussion somewhere.

The problem I see with the proposal as mentioned on the wiki above
(which incidentally should be on wiki.ubuntu.com, not help.ubuntu.com)
is that it appears to essentially double the work of the existing
teams in Ubuntu. Ubuntu itself is a large community team and therefore
has more contributors than any one single project in Ubuntu (I see
Lubuntu as a Ubuntu team, I think this is a fair comment). As a
smaller team I think we should be utilising the existing structure of
Ubuntu for our needs as much as possible. To completely separate
ourselves like is proposed in the governance document will create an
enormous amount of bureaucracy and work for those involved with no
real tangible benefits to the Lubuntu community. I personally would
like to see as much work getting done on the project instead of just
trying to keep the project running.

I could perhaps see benefit in organising team liaisons with the
already existing Ubuntu teams but to create whole separate other teams
to me seems a bit daunting and as we've proven over the last few
months there really isn't the number of contributors required to keep
such a number of sub teams afloat. If we had hundreds of contributors
working on the project we probably would need a system as complex as
the one described. Unfortunately, the Lubuntu list of active
contributors is not that large.

As far as electing governance bodies, don't we already have the means
to do this? As far as I'm aware anyone contributing significantly and
sustained amounts is already eligible for Ubuntu Membership, so why
not make voting rights simply those that are Ubuntu Members as well as
being in the Lubuntu team? As far as what to vote on, I don't know
what we're really expecting these elected officials to decide for us.
Most real decisions on Lubuntu itself should be done on Launchpad via
the existing bug system or via consensus on the mailing list. In my
opinion, any other issues should be taken to the relevant Ubuntu team
for guidance (e.g. for a documentation question, as the Ubuntu Docs
team, for a QA question, as the Ubuntu QA team, etc.). So really,
other than consensus there shouldn't a lot of tie breaking to be done
by elected people, and if required, the elected people could be the
ones that already exist in the Ubuntu governance boards and councils.

The positions I see as requirements are:
* Chairperson/s - responsible for ensuring meetings are organised,
chaired and documented afterwards. They don't have to do this all
themselves but they need to make arrangements to ensure they occur.
* Team reporter - responsible for ensuring Team Reports are completed
on time and complete. Again, these don't have to be done all by one or
two people but someone needs to be responsible for ensuring they
occur. If you're not sure what a team report is then the wiki page is
available - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports

In my opinion everything else is really just a position for the sake
of having positions. At the end of the day those that are doing will
still continue to do, those that aren't are free to join in and do.

-- 
Regards,

Jared Norris JP(Qual) BBehSc(Psych)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JaredNorris