Lessons Learned

Luis Villa luis at tieguy.org
Tue Mar 20 16:56:06 UTC 2007


On 3/20/07, Greg Dekoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>
> > Instead, Fedora has a leadership system, which is widely being ignored
> > by the public, unless it interferes with individual contributor
> > interests.
>
> Isn't that basically how governments work?
>
> The *real* question: when the Fedora leadership (government) interferes
> with the interests of the individual contributor (citizen) -- which is, of
> course, inevitable -- does the individual contributor (citizen) have
> meaningful recourse?

That is one question you could ask. The other question you could ask
is what tools government can use to convince the contributor to accept
the interference, while still contributing.

The tools could include strong community norms/peer pressure; this is
where Debian fails- their community norm is that you should discuss
the thing to death. Everyone is afraid to say 'STFU and code, or STFU
and go away.' There is no strong leadership which feels empowered to
say 'OK, we've discussed it, discussion is done, we're acting now.'

Probably I'm overreacting about the specific issue of release dates
(given my biases there). The core question I wanted to ask is how does
Fedora say to contributors 'we love you, we love your ideas, but we
apologize- we have to move on. So kindly please STFU so we can get on
with our core business of _________.' Debian seems socially incapable
of doing that; it would be a shame if in the name of
democracy/deliberation Fedora went down the same route.

Luis




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