[IAEP] Announcing the Development Team Lead election

[Chris Ball]

Hi Tomeu,

   > I actually stepped down as development team coordinator which
   > is/was an administrative role, I wasn't the development team
   > leader because that position has never existed before in our
   > community. I tried to make it very clear on the email you cite.

Sorry about that.  I wasn't thinking of a strong distinction between
the two; we started talking about electing a new lead in the SLOBS
meeting, and the title stuck in my writing.

   > - "being a responsive upstream for work we receive from the
   > community": this sounds like a rather big responsibility to
   > me. For example, what will happen with modules that are
   > unmaintained such as hulahop and browse?

For this point, we were thinking about someone who makes sure that
patches sent in for review are replied to and applied quickly (perhaps
via delegation), rather than someone who will single-handedly maintain
all the code we've received in the past.  In short, we want to make
sure that there's no bottleneck on community contributions of patches
at the SL end.

   > - "appointing a release manager for the next (0.90) release": if
   > you mean just formally appointing whoever the team members
   > choose, then I'm fine with it, but it's not obvious for me as
   > it's expressed. What about the other positions related to
   > development, the team lead also need to appoint those? Until now
   > we have never seen two people competing for a role, nor
   > disagreement on a candidacy.

We talked in the SLOBS meeting on Friday about our urgent need to start
planning 0.90, and decided that finding a release manager would be a
good first task for the new development team lead/coordinator.  If the
development team is already able to appoint a new release manager, you
should certainly go ahead and do that -- we were operating under the
assumption that no-one had been found yet.

(I think part of the reason I had that assumption is that the wiki page
for the development team only lists you and Simon as members.)
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Contacts

   > - "coordination with the Design and Deployment Teams on new
   > features": do we really need that the team leads takes this
   > responsibility as well? Or is assumed that the team lead will
   > delegate it on others?

I think that team leads should take responsibility for this, but that
the responsibility can be satisfied by delegating it to others.

   > May I suggest that both candidates and voters are restricted to
   > development team members? This would encourage interested people
   > to join the team, strengthening it. I think that by giving some
   > autonomy to teams we'll be encouraging them to take ownership of
   > their areas.

That sounds fine, if you're saying that standing/voting is still open
to anyone, but that they should first sign up to join the team before
doing either.

   > I agree is very important to find people interested on leading
   > efforts and taking responsibilities, but I think is equally
   > important to have a team structure that encourage division of
   > work, diversity of opinions and pooling of resources.

Makes sense.  Sounds like we should defer to the Development Team
in defining the role.

   > I'm also not sure we need a full-blown election with
   > selectricity. I'm thinking that open voting on the mailing list
   > may be enough, unless we are expecting that people won't vote
   > freely without anonymity.

Okay.  Let's continue gathering candidates as we were, and then
the team can decide what to do with the result; whether to have
an internal election, full election or something else.

   > Thanks to you for taking this important task, I'm very happy to
   > see we are making progresses on this area. Hope the concerns I
   > have raised above aren't seen as push back but as sincere
   > opinions.

No problem.

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child