Re: Questions

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Robert Staudinger wrote:
> please candidates, be so kind to answer my questions below.

This is now the fourth "please answer my questions" mail which has come
to the list - the idea of "Questions for the candidates" is to avoid
making people socially responsible for individual questions - I really
don't mind, but I would have preferred that the "questions for
candidates" be announced here, and then be sent, rather than having to
accumulate questions like this.

> (i) Concerns can be heard throughout the community every now and then,
> that the increasing corporate interest and investment makes it harder
> and harder to contribute code for volunteers.
> Q: What is your feeling about that?

Yes, it's hard to contribute when you're working on a project with
someone who's working 50 hours on it when you can only manage 10 - you
have the feeling that most of your time is spent figuring out what the
other guy has done while you were in bed or at work. But it's manageable.

If there is a problem, it's that some of the companies around GNOME now
see positive contribution with the community as a handicap to Getting
Things Done. Too many bike shed discussions, too many demands for help
from too many directions. And so rather than address that problem, they
choose to retract from the community - work on their project and release
a big chunk of code When It's Ready.

When you're an employee of a company, people somehow have the impression
that now that you're no longer a volunteer, that you are at their beck &
call. When you're a volunteer, and an employee retreats into his shell,
then contributing becomes more difficult.

> (ii) Are you interested in working on making it easier for people
> willing to contribute code?

Facilitating people's contributions is part of the board's (and the
foundation's) role.

> (iii) What measures will you conduct to make contribution of code
> easier for volunteers. (E.g. it can be rather frustrating having an
> unreviewed patch in bugzilla for months.)

All I can do is give examples - there was an obvious problem with
foundation membership - partly in the tone of messages coming from the
membership committee, partly because the workload was heavy, and partly
because the community wasn't helping by responding to requests for
information from references.

So I went to the membership committee and asked what the problem was. I
suggested recruiting new members and gave a list of people I thought
could positively contribute, and who would, in addition, address some of
the shortcomings that people had with the membership process -
specifically, regional groups weren't represented, it was difficult to
evaluate non-technical contributions - and the membership committee got
two new members from that list - Izabel Cerqueira and Clytie Siddall.

Since then, I have been in contact with them to see if there were any
problems getting integrated into the team, and making sure that they had
all the information they needed to participate. There's been some
issues, but I was talking to Sankharshan recently, and he assures me
that after the elections there will be more time to get everyone up to
speed.

Moral of the story? Changing things doesn't happen with broad strokes,
it happens by identifying a specific problem, trying to characterise it
to the best of your ability, talking to the concerned parties to get
their opinions, making a proposal based on that consultation, and then
following it over time to make sure there are no issues. This is time
consuming, but it's the way to make things better for specific cases.

> (iv) The GNOME Advisory has been formed to handle communication
> between partys with commercial interest and the GNOME project.
> Q: Do you think that a similar institution should be formed to handle
> community feedback in an organised manner or will community
> contributors have to communicate back using mailing lists and IRC as
> it always was?

The second one.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
dneary free fr