10 Oct
2011
10 Oct
'11
6:41 p.m.
Hi,
On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 5:53 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
Hi Guillaume,
Your arguments are very valid and I've considered them a lot before sending
my vote. Actually to be perfectly honest, I've been on the fence on this
question for several years now. However I've been slightly more in favor of
the private list idea lately (I think due to the fact that I've proposed
quite a few committers. It's probably harder to understand if you haven't
done so).
See below for more details.
On Oct 10, 2011, at 4:04 PM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
Or in other words, you're telling us that you don't trust people enough to
carry out a real voting process in the open:
- You're afraid that committers will not dare speaking out their minds in
public
- You're afraid that potential committers will not have the guts to take
the feedback kindly and build upon it, whatever it is
You *could* launch the vote in the open and gather real feedback, but you
don't want to do it because you're afraid of everybody's reactions and their
impact on the project. Although that's a bit sad with regards to your faith
in human nature, your arguments make a lot of sense, as well as the quote
you provide below.
My proposal is just to make voting a new member a real voting process.
Hi,
I agree with Caty on this. Voting someone a committer is an important
event,
it's a acknowledgement of her value by fellow
community members. In
addition
to this, if an existing committer thinks that a
proposed new committer
does
not provide work of a good enough quality to
become a committer, I think
that it's very important for the existing committer to articulate her
judgement so that the potential new committer can improve and try again.
In
addition to this, it forces existing committers
to argue in favor of and
stand by their point of view.
The same is true when one wants to retire a committer or make her
emeritus.
If she disagrees, she should be able to debate
her point of view in the
open. Plus some members of the community outside existing committers
might
provide valuable feedback about a potential new
committer.
I also believe that you are raising a non-existing issue. In the 6+ years
of
existence of the XWiki community and using an
open process to vote new
committers, I have not heard even once anyone complaining about having an
open process. Nor am I aware of any friction caused by this process. If
anything, it only strengthens the authenticity and transparency of
XWiki's
Open-Source community.
Actually this questions arises relatively frequently in open source
communities (be it apache or elsewhere) and I've seen it raised several
times in my 12-13 years of open source.
The other reason you haven't experienced may be because you've not proposed
committers yet. You haven't had to individually contact every one to make
sure the vote will get accepted, convince people offline that it's a good
choice, etc. Apparently you call this transparency… :) I don't.
How many times have you seen people voting with restrictions on new members
or even with -1? Answer: none
How many times have you seen people voting with restrictions or even -1 or
topics other than member voting? Answer: frequently
Why? Because people are respectful and tend to shy away from telling
someone in their face that they just sucks, or that they're too junior even
with 15 years of experience… ;)
Actually you're forgetting one part which is one issue IMO. Let me give you
an example. Imagine that I've seen that XXX has a good level of
understanding of the xwiki platform and that he's submitted several patches
in the past and I think he would be a good addition to the committers to the
xwiki project. Right now I have 2 choices:
* Send a VOTE email on the devs list. Two possibilities:
** he's accepted. Now I need to ask him if he's interested. If not, then
the vote was for nothing
** he's not accepted. Now XXX sees this. Maybe someone said that he needs
to provides more patches before he can be accepted or that his patches have
some issues, etc. On one hand it's good since he now knows what he should
improve, OTOH depending on how well-phrased or not the negative answers
were, he'll feel let down and make simply stop participating to the project
completely
* Ask the potential committer if he'd be willing to become a committer
(with all the committer duties - see committership on dev.xwiki.org).
** if he says yes and he's not accepted that sucks since you had increased
his expectations and he's going to feel he's been let down or that his work
is not appreciated, etc
** if he says no, then no issues. No vote is started. However others don't
know about it.
Ideally I'd go for this one, while giving a clear explanation to the guy
beforehand that he may or may not be validated as a committer.
The solution I'm proposing is to send a mail on the committers@ list. If
he's voted ok then we can contact him and ask him
if he's interested in
becoming a committer. If he's voted down no harm is done.
I agree that this is the safest course of action, although a bit sad.
Now I've always hesitated on this topic since I've seen arguments on both
sides of the fence. I also agree that ideally it would
be best done in the
open if it could work but it doesn't IMO because of the way human relations
work. People don't tell other people what they think of them in front of
their face.
If we don't try, we'll never move towards that goal ;-)
Here's what Karl Fogel says in his book:
"Producing open source software:
how to run a successful free software project":
http://producingoss.com/en/consensus-democracy.html
"
[…]
The voting system itself should be used to choose new committers, both full
and partial. But here is one of the rare instances where secrecy is
appropriate. You can't have votes about potential committers posted to a
public mailing list, because the candidate's feelings (and reputation) could
be hurt. Instead, the usual way is that an existing committer posts to a
private mailing list consisting only of the other committers, proposing that
someone be granted commit access. The other committers speak their minds
freely, knowing the discussion is private. Often there will be no
disagreement, and therefore no vote necessary. After waiting a few days to
make sure every committer has had a chance to respond, the proposer mails
the candidate and offers him commit access. If there is disagreement,
discussion ensues as for any other question, possibly resulting in a vote.
For this process to be open and frank, the mere fact that the discussion is
taking place at all should be secret. If the person under consideration knew
it was going on, and then were never offered commit access, he could
conclude that he had lost the vote, and would likely feel hurt. Of course,
if someone explicitly asks for commit access, then there is no choice but to
consider the proposal and explicitly accept or reject him.
Let's say you propose someone to become committer, the guy says he's
interested, but in the end he gets this answer:
If the latter, then it should be done as politely as
possible, with a clear
explanation: "We liked your patches, but haven't seen enough of them yet,"
or "We appreciate all your patches, but they required considerable
adjustments before they could be applied, so we don't feel comfortable
giving you commit access yet. We hope that this will change over time,
though." Remember, what you're saying could come as a blow, depending on the
person's level of confidence. Try to see it from their point of view as you
write the mail.
[…]
"
What's so wrong? Now the guy knows what's expected of him and what he needs
to do if he truly wants to become a committer. Since you've asked him in the
first place, you know that he's at least interested in becoming a committer.
His ego shouldn't be bruised that much.
Guillaume
In contrast to this, having an opaque voting process
opens the door to
questioning from the outside world (was there
backdoor discussions with
regards to the vote of X? if not, why was the vote hidden?). Having a
fully
open public voting process reinforces the trust
of every member in the
community. Although I agree that security-related issues are a valid
exception, I don't think that it's the case for voting new committers.
Thus I'm (non-binding) -1 on this new proposal (about which I maybe would
not even have been able to talk if that policy was put in place).
The goal is not to decide to put other VOTEs on this private list. Only for
committer voting.
Thanks
-Vincent
Guillaume
On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <
valicac(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Not very sure about it.
>
> And how do we announce the new commiter that he has been voted? Are we
> still
> making the announcement public?
> The feeling of being voted is very nice, you get a picture of the people
> that appreciate what you do. Letting this go would be a pitty and if we
are
> not removing this part then it means we are
gonna duplicate the vote.
>
> Also the voting process is usually initiated by an existing commiter.
IMO
> the initiator is responsible to assure he is
proposing someone who will
be
> accepted without problems. Until now people
that didn't agreed with
> something (or didn't had enough information about the topic) they didn't
> vote. Because our number is increasing I propose to increase the needed
> votes to pass the proposal from 3 to 5+, or why not even half+1 in
> important
> cases, like this one.
>
> IMO, we either do everything public or not. So doing a private list just
> for
> this purpose is not sufficient IMO and is also a not very encountered
case.
>
> Thanks,
> Caty
>
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 16:16, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
>
>>
>> On Oct 10, 2011, at 3:05 PM, Vincent Massol wrote:
>>
>>> Hi devs,
>>>
>>> There are a few topics that are not supposed to be public or that
would
>> be better be not public.
>>>
>>> One such topic is when we want to VOTE someone as a committer. It's
> very
>> uncomfortable to do this in the open for the following reasons:
>>> * committers are tempted to VOTE +1 since voting negatively is seen
>> publicly, including by the person being voted on
>>> * it's very undelicate to have this in the open especially if the
> person
>> is voted down since that'll affect that person's morale and future
>> participation in the project
>>>
>>> So I'd like to propose creating a committers(a)xwiki.org list with the
>> following characteristics:
>>> * private, visible only to committers
>>
>> So here are some use cases for this list:
>>
>> * voting in members
>> * excluding members
>>
>> Any other topic you see?
>>
>> +1 from me.
>>
>>> I also propose it to use it for voting committers.
>>
>> +1
>>
>> Thanks
>> -Vincent
>>
>>> WDYT?
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> -Vincent
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