[IAEP] Announcing the Development Team Lead election

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 16:45, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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.

It's good to have someone caring about this and busy maintainers use
to appreciate when they are pinged when some patch needs attention.
Something I think that could be a tremendous improvement is moving the
review report from dev.laptop.org to bugs.sugarlabs.org. By having an
automated report that tells what is in the queue and for how long,
maintainers have a very direct feedback without nobody having to do
extra effort past the initial installation.

>   > - "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.

But if the dev team cannot find a release manager, how could the dev
team leader?

Maybe I have been reading too much in the particular chose of words,
as Walter said, and by appointing you meant just to keep the issue of
the release manager in the TODO list and agenda until one is found.

> (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

That's really unfortunate, hopefully this will get fixed soon.

>   > - "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.

Well, each team could put conditions on who can become a member, but I
don't have a strong opinion on this.

>   > 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.

Sounds great, thanks again for stepping up with this.

Regards,

Tomeu

>   > 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
>