Magnus Enger wrote:
On 9 November 2010 02:03, MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> wrote:
Irma Birchall wrote:
Below are notes that Bob and I compiled from a meeting at the KohaCon10 hackfest in Wellington last Sunday.
That was last Sunday, after myself and some others had left. Even at its peak, I think only 8 of 20+ development groups were present at the hackfest. Who was still present when this unannounced meeting happened? Did anyone comment on the inappropriate timing and minority attendence?
It was my clear understanding that none of those present at this "meeting" in any way saw it as a formal meeting, [...]
Thanks, that's great to know, but doesn't answer either question. Who was present and did anyone comment on the timing and minority of views? There was a published schedule for the first day at the hackfest, which could have shown this. There was the final session at the main conference which could have discussed this too. These aren't topics which only appeared during the hackfest: someone had discussed them with me earlier and I'd outlined why I feel a technical committee would be an unnecessary backwards step. So I hope you can see why I feel this may have been submarined until some of us more-community/ less-businessy types had left.
Is this a plan to overload us with bureaucracy and more meetings to attend?
That was not what I heard. I think the main thing was to get more discussion/involvement around RFCs and long term decisions. And it was thought that one way to do this would be to have some kind of group of interested people looking into matters of interest, and then making their comments/recommendations available to the rest of the community before decisions are made.
That may be one way to do it, but have you ever tried to get a committee recommendation overturned in a similar system? It's hard. If we want to generate more RFC discussions, then I think there are simpler ways we should try first, before we disempower the release managers and wider community in this way. For example, we could start talking about feature RFCs more than bloody bureaucracy. I'd also clarify the boundaries and ban cross-posting between koha lists, to reduce the mail volumes. And appeal for people to average at most two or three list emails a day. Is this an attempt by some developers to externalise the cost of leading RFC discussions onto the wider community? But developers have the most to gain from an RFC they started being accepted... What are the specific problems with long-term decisions? I think one thing that some developers are worried about is that a long-term decision might not stick. If so, then the way to make it stick is to build consensus, not to appoint a ruling committee. As you can see from our lovely UK government and probably others, a change of composition in the ruling committee can mean reversal of a "long-term" decision if there wasn't consensus anyway.
For further discussion and resolution at the Monthly IRC Meeting on 10 November.
Please don't.
Agreed. It would seem out of character for our community to decide anything of this magnitude so fast. ;-) But let's discuss it a bit tomorrow and then let the meeting decide the next step(s)?
Pfff! As I pointed out, if we introduce a technical committee ruling over the release manager during 3.4, we probably break Chris's release date before work's hardly started. Why compound the AAF proposal arising from an unannounced meeting by holding a timetabling discussion at short notice? Hope that clarifies, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. Past Koha Release Manager (2.0), LMS programmer, statistician, webmaster. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire for Koha work http://www.software.coop/products/koha