On 9 January 2017 at 08:43, Stephan Kulow
Am 08.01.2017 um 00:29 schrieb Richard Brown:
On 7 January 2017 at 23:09, Administrator
wrote: The discussion is about consensus. openSUSE is a collaborative effort not a fiefdom. For matters such as this I’m happy that there is engaged discussion and I wish more people were contributing. If you wish to help, you could devise a more efficient way to discuss these matters and assess the support for the various competing proposals.
The ‘resolution’ you propose doesn’t have the support of the majority of members, so it’s no resolution. The resolution which does have support is to leave it as is.
You seem to have mistaken openSUSE with a democracy
openSUSE is a collaborative effort, a collaborative meritocratic effort. It is not the majority of members, or contributors, or mailinglist posters who decide. It is a project driven by "Those who do, decide"
This is bullshit, sorry. Because "Those who undo, decide too". So without a discussion your rule doesn't make sense. In the end, the majority will win - less people do than undo.
As I stated in the quoted mail "If there was a case of contributors pushing in two different directions, yes, sure, consensus is great" Someone "doing" and then someone else "undoing" is, by definition, contributors pushing in two different directions. In such cases, yes, I agree with you. Consensus is important and discussion is absolutely necessary. But the mindset that consensus must come first is toxic to the long term health of a project like openSUSE. We've seen this for years Coolo, and it leads to serious problems; Paralysis while willing contributors wait for a decision that may never come; Potential contributors scared away from contributing because they think they need to ask permission or gather a broad consensus from lots of scary established contributors like us; These are not problems we can afford to ignore. We need people to feel they are empowered to contribute, and do so with as few barriers in the way. Getting broad support for their change is one such barrier, and most of the time other people don't care about the new contributors change anyway. As a mature project we have enough checks and balances to ensure it doesn't decend into anarchy. When discussion is needed, in any venue, but particularly the mailinglists there is also the additional issue of the "peanut gallery" [1] We have lots of non-contributors who have an opinion and are very happy to share it, but they are not willing or able to do anything to turn their opinion into reality. Their opinions are not necessarily invalid and shouldn't necessarily be ignored, but they often include strongly held concerns based on theory and speculation rather than reality. This noise reduces the efficiency of the whole project and discourages time-limited contributors for paying enough attention to these discussions where consensus is formed. Having people take the 'do first, then discuss' approach at least means any subsequent discussions that appear are framed in the context of the actual contributions, something that actually works and actually exists, which goes a long way towards ensuring the discussions are more productive than debating concepts and theoretical problems. It's not bullshit, it's a healthy mindset for sustainable contributions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_gallery -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org