Future of MOTU

[Emmet Hikory]

Michael Bienia wrote:
> On 2010-03-02 12:55:00 +0900, Emmet Hikory wrote:
>> Michael Bienia wrote:
>> > On 2010-02-22 12:53:09 +0900, Emmet Hikory wrote:
>
> [MOTU Leaders]
> I fully understand that but do you have an idea how to keep this list of
> Leaders open so that no impression of a "fixed" list of Leader
> (positions) arises and nobody dares to propose a new Leader (position)?

    This is an excellent point, and not one I'd considered before.
Given this potential, I'd be willing to do without MOTU Leaders, and
retain leadership to the several MOTU.  What do you think about the
idea of having a nomination period after each cycle, and keeping a
page honoring individual MOTU for achievements of great note in each
cycle?

> [MOTU meetings]
>> > While I'd would like to see regular MOTU meetings happen again, I also
>> > see that it's will be a hard task (sorry for sounding pessimistic).
>> > Without much to discuss I assume only a few people will attending a
>> > meeting (and stay up late or wake up early) just to hear status reports
>> > and prefer to read those status reports in the minutes.
>>
>>     Are there any other strategies that you could suggest that would
>> help to improve communication and accountability within the team?  My
>> experience with other teams is that when meetings aren't being held,
>> growth and activity slow.
>
> Sorry no other ideas. And didn't want to stop you (or anybody else) from
> reviving the MOTU meetings.
> We should also try to get the ubuntu-motu ML more active again e.g. with
> those status reports (transitions: active, finished, planned; QA
> efforts; current "health" of universe; etc). When I look at my
> ubuntu-motu mailbox I mostly see only request originated from MOTU being
> set as the maintainer in packages.

    I'm not tempted to lead MOTU Metings if there's not consensus it's
the right way to proceed, because I think partial or unbalanced
involvement will lead to either alienation or a sense of "iniders" and
"outsiders".  If most of us agree it's a good thing, and that we'll
try to make at least some of them, I think they can work.  More
traffic on the mailing list would be nice, but it needs people to
track things and send them.  We've developed tools to autotrack, and
this reduced the notifications.  Automated notifications would be bad,
in my opinion (or at least I'd steadily ignore them).


>> > Have we a rough number of how many "active" MOTUs we currently have?
>> > (with a loose definition of "active" as at least one upload/merge/sync
>> > for lucid)
>
> I don't want hard numbers (e.g. 42 MOTUs were active during the karmic
> cycle) or even a list of names. I'm just interested in a rough estimate
> of which percentage from those over 100 direct members LP lists seems to
> be active in "universe" (what ever active might actually means being it
> direct or indirect (e.g. through Debian)). As this might explain why
> there is only few communication. 20 active MOTUs have much less to
> discuss than 80 active MOTUs (in which case I'd wonder myself why there
> is nothing to discuss).
> Something like "we have around 30-40 active MOTUs" or "we have around
> 70-90 active MOTUs" would be fully sufficient for me as I don't have an
> idea how big MOTU actually is we try here to reform.

    My feeing from a quick scan of relevant sources is that we're in
the 20-30 range for some elvel of activity (highly variable).  I'm
probably undercounting, but I doubt it's in the 70-80 range (or eve
much above 50).  Note that this count excluded those MOTU who are also
some other sort of developer (often core-dev) as I didn't analyse the
activity closely to determine where it fell.

-- 
Emmet HIKORY