Future of MOTU Council

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello,

thanks for starting the discussion.

On 22.02.2010 05:08, Emmet Hikory wrote:
>     I believe the current MOTU council to be powerless, and not
> necessarily representative of the future of MOTU.  As a result, I
> believe that the current incumbents should be thanked for their work
> to date, and resleased from the responsibilities of the Council.
> Further, I suggest that all current responsibilities of MOTU council
> revert to the Community Council, Developer Membership Board, MOTU
> Meeting, or Technical Board, depending on from where they were
> derived.  

Agreed.


> This mailing list should be retained for preservation of
> historical logs, and discussion of any future MOTU Council.

I think we should just close the mailing list and keep its archive
around for hysterical raisins. I do all the moderation for the list
right now and it's no fun. Keeping it open just for the sake of a
discussion about some probable future MC seems to be a bit much, this
discussion can easily happen on the MOTU mailing list too.


>     Once MOTU has settled into the new role defintion (4), I would
> hope that then then natural polity would select a MOTU Council as part
> of the governance structure.  My vision would include MOTU Council
> with the following responsibilities:
> 
>  * Oversee MOTU Leaders
>  * Facilitate MOTU Meeting
>  * Resolve MOTU disputes
>  * Assist in alignment of policies and procedures with
> distribution-wide practices
> 
>     Depending on the perceived performance of the Developer Membership
> Board, and the demonstrated maturity of the new MOTU team, and the
> selected Council, it may be appropriate to request that MOTU Council
> be again delegated authority to approve new MOTU, but I don't think
> this should be a primary function of the team, rather simply that I
> think that such a MOTU Council would be the logical body to perform
> such approvals was MOTU delegated authority to select members
> independently again (which I'm unsure is a good idea until the team
> has adjusted to the new role, and external perceptions of the team
> match that role).
> 
>     I don't feel there is great value in discussing precisely how MOTU
> Council would work, or precisely what responsibilities it may have
> external to a wider discussion of MOTU identity and MOTU governance,
> for which I believe the ubuntu-motu mailing list to be a more
> appropriate forum.
> 
> 1: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2010-February/000672.html
> 2: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2010-February/000673.html
> 3: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-motu/2010-February/006546.html
> 4: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/LucidMOTU

I personally feel that in the current setup a MC is an unnecessary,
heavy-weight and bureaucratic addition to the MOTU team. In the last
months the MOTU team has demonstrated that, apart from approving new
members and developers, the MC does not need to approve or guide or
oversee a lot: whatever could have been better organised in the team
could have been done very well by individual MOTUs as opposed to
individual MOTUs wearing their MC hat.

With a lot of MC experience having been incorporated in the DMB (which
should for now have sufficient bandwidth to deal with all kinds of
applications), I don't think that having a MOTU Council is justified.

I also would like to comment on the proposed vision for the future MC:
1) we should have more "MOTU Leaders" again, yes, but that in my eyes
does not need an MC, 2) we also should more MOTU meetings too, history
shows that this doesn't need an MC either. 2) The current boards and
councils should be in a good position to resolve disputes (if we really
shouldn't be able to solve them among us). 4) The point of Archive
Reorg, which is now slowly happening, is two-fold: a) provide a
framework in which we can provide simpler access to sets of packages
(both from an ACL point of view as from packages point of view) while b)
unifying processes and merging initiatives (release teams, sru teams,
etc.) - I can't see how a future MC would help with the discussions that
are happening right now?


Whatever we might choose to do in a few months or years I feel we should
for now just try things out and see how they work.

Have a great day,
 Daniel