Request: please consider clarifying the project's position on Spins

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 9:39 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg
<greg.dekoenigsberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Larry Cafiero <larry.cafiero at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 3:48 AM, Greg DeKoenigsberg
>> <greg.dekoenigsberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> To be clear: much of this responsibility should fall on the advocates for
>>> these spins.  "Hey Meego, want more marketing?  Recruit some folks to the
>>> marketing team who care about Meego to help carry the load."
>>
>>
>> This is probably the most relevant paragraph in this entire thread, and
>> thanks Greg for making this point. Instead of "much of the responsibility,"
>> though, I'd say "most of the responsibility" or even arguably "all of the
>> responsibility."
>
> But then the question becomes: if spin folks are entirely response bringing
> volunteers to help with these tasks, what's their incentive to send them to
> another team to do the work?
>
> The analogue in the working world: I'm not going to recruit a resource so
> that resource can be "managed" by someone else in such a way that I only get
> that resource part-time.  I'm going to recruit someone who works for me, and
> does my bidding, and I'm going to hoard that resource, unless there's a
> *clear* benefit to me for sharing that resource.
>
> Seems to me like we've got two ways of providing resources to various
> subprojects: 1. infrastructure support, and 2. people support.  I would
> argue that we've done a good job at 1., and a poor job at 2.
>
> Maybe the "Spins SIG" should have a strong focus on improving infrastructure
> support.  Improving kopers, QA infrastructure, build hosts -- those are
> things that we can figure out how to scale.  Scaling people is much harder,
> and clearly much more contentious.

As maintainer of two spins I have enough problems recruiting people to
do the core stuff in the Spins let alone trying to get people for QA,
Design and everything else. And I even have problems with getting the
other groups to do even basic things for my spins with a few
exceptions like QA who have been exceptional. If I had to attempt to
recruit people to do everything I would just drop the spins altogether
as it just wouldn't be worth the stress and problems.

Peter