[IAEP] [SLOBS] Motions A & B for Tomorrow

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 12:09 PM, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:

>
> On 2 June 2016 at 09:32, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Specifically, I asked for evidence that there was a pressing need for
>> unilateral approval of small expenditures and if so, why the existing
>> scheme of pushing that responsibility to the teams as we currently do with
>> the infrastructure team isn't a better strategy than putting that control
>> in the hands of an individual.
>>
>> I did concede the point that having one person responsible for ensuing
>> that financial transactions with the Conservancy are well form and complete
>> would likely make life for the Conservancy better and thus have no
>> objection to that aspect of the proposal.
>>
>
> It seems to me that the 2nd point answers the first; delegating small
> spends to all teams means the likelihood the transactions are not well
> formed for Conservancy increases.
>
> I also am somewhat adverse to there being 'teams' at all at this point,
> since the proactive community is so small. Why not just consider Sugar Labs
> a single team? And thus have a single Finance Manager.
>
> In 'organizational theory', Sugar has previously been somewhat a
> 'divisional organization' where there are separate groups that act more or
> less independently. This is very common, and the history of DuPont
> innovating this organizational form was for me very interesting;
> https://stratechery.com/2013/why-microsofts-reorganization-is-a-bad-idea/
> is a nice essay about all this from a few years ago when Ballmer was
> crashing the company :)
>
> "Consider General Electric, the classic example of a divisional company.
> It has twenty-five different businesses, ranging from finance to jet
> turbines."
>
>
> In a small organization without very different lines of business, this is
> not the ideal organizational form, and I think Sugar Labs is better
> organized as a 'functional organization' rather than divisional.
>

I guess I don't really understand what you mean by functional vs divisional
in the case of SL. The teams are functional and are the people in the
community closest to the issues they are dealing with. Giving Bernie the
ability to run to Microcenter to buy a connector to keep the servers
running makes sense. Asking Bernie to speak with Person X to ask permission
to do the same makes no sense. Having Bernie submit receipts to Person X to
submit to the Conservancy makes sense.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
<http://www.sugarlabs.org>
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