DMB: Proposal for a different review process

[Marc Cluet]

Hi maco,

On 4 Aug 2011, at 15:12, Mackenzie Morgan wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 10:00 AM, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Am 04.08.2011 15:32 schrieb "Mackenzie Morgan" <macoafi at gmail.com>:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 6:01 AM, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>>> hi,
>>>> Am Mittwoch, den 03.08.2011, 17:05 -0400 schrieb Scott Kitterman:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Much of this entire discussion was started by Canonical employees
>>>>> wanting
>>>>> special case treatment for upstream work sponsored by Canonical.
>>>> this is totally untrue if i read the log [1] from the meeting that
>>>> caused you to start this rant against canonical ...
>>> 
>>> See Robbie & Dustin both second-guessing the DMB here in [2]
>>> Dustin got upset here [3], when an applicant who said he believed his
>>> work to be on a "separate project" [4] did not get accepted.
>>> There was also the time Robbie criticized the regional board for
>>> saying Kate hadn't been around long enough yet for membership [5]
>>> 
>>>> [1] http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/08/02/%23ubuntu-meeting.txt
>>> 
>>> [2] http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/06/20/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t21:19
>>> [3] http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/07/18/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t20:00
>>> [4] http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/07/18/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t19:45
>>> [5] http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2010/12/17/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t04:21
>>> 
>> So you identfied robbiew, dustin, jcastro and skaet as people that have a
>> differing opinion about contributions than the DMB has, i hope you are aware
>> that canonical has nerly 500 employees, why does everyone here seem to think
>> that what less than 1% of the company employees say reflects the attitude of
>> canonical ?
> 
> I'd actually take Kate off that list. In that log, you can see that
> she says she only applied at that time because Robbie & Jono said to.
> I don't think everybody at Canonical shares that opinion, but the
> pattern of "Canonical manager gets angry when his employee is
> rejected" is pretty obvious to anyone on any of the boards.  Do I
> honestly believe there are some managers at Canonical who think that
> the way membership works is:
> - Hire someone
> - Wait a token number of months
> - Get new hire to write an application
> - New hire writes a "meh" application
> - Get other team members to all write testimonials because quantity
> beats quality
> - Automatic approval
> 
> YES!
> 

I think you're depicting here a hyperbole in order to drive your point, let me please as one of the people working at Canonical that got rejected by the DMB give you my 2 cents.

I joined Canonical in January in order to further enhance cloud and server integration through systems integration, which is mainly what I do most of the time here, due to this both my colleague Juan (who also got refused) and I have been working on several projects which have required acquiring packaging skills very quickly, both Juan and I have been tutored by amazing people from the community and Canonical in order to gain these skills and be able to contribute actively to Ubuntu and to the community in order to make Ubuntu the best server and cloud operating system.

Amongst those projects are Orchestra and Ensemble, both are mainly driven by Canonical but are Ubuntu projects, as emerging projects they do need some time to catch the community interest, so far they've been driving by very sharp minds working for Canonical (amongst them Clint Byrum and Gustavo Niemeyer, my kudos go to them).

When our manager Dustin believed that we had gathered enough experience in order to become Ubuntu members he recommended us to do so, since he believes strongly in the community and Ubuntu (as so do we, otherwise we wouldn't be working for Canonical), and he gave us his recommendation, not out of being our manager but out of believing that we could be very useful community members and that after working with us in a day to day basis for months he thought we were more than ready for taking this step. I can completely understand Dustin's frustration from this point of view and I'm sad that this is resounding negatively with you Mackenzie, I do apologise personally (for my contributing part of being rejected) for that.

When I stepped in front of the DMB in the irc meeting I was rejected because they felt that I didn't interact enough with the Ubuntu community, even if I've been interacting directly with upstreams (mcollective, ruby, etc…) and there's no community involvement yet with Orchestra, although there's some already with Ensemble that I'm very happy about. As you can understand it's a very complicated situation to be in.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for the DMB and its altruistic task, and I'll be the first one to defend its judgements. I learned from the DMB meeting and try very hard to downplay the negative parts of it and learn constructively from the recommendations, I'll try again to apply for contributing developer in the future because I believe I can be useful to the community not only when I'm working for Canonical but also on my free time.

Hope this extended explanation gives you a bit more insight from the other side :)

Cheers,

>> did anyone talk to the persons individually? what did you do to sort this
>> in an individual manner with the respective person?
> 
> To Kate, yes. She didn't go off mid-meeting or rant in-channel.  I
> talked to her later about how to improve her application (like
> including representing Ubuntu at DebConf).  The others seem to prefer
> to air their grievances publicly in-channel.
> 
>> or did you just think
>> "screw it, these canonical bastards again, sigh" and blame canonical for
>> their opinions ?
> 
> More like:
> Ugh, these two getting upset about the people they manage being
> rejected. Again. How predictable! *eye roll*
> 
> -- 
> Mackenzie Morgan
> 
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