inamerrata

Like last year I thought I might blog some random thoughts on the DPL campaign from the last few weeks. Since there’s already the platforms to read, not to mention the debate, and the various mails to the debian-vote mailing list, I’ll add a fold to make it easy to skip.

One thing which seemed a marked improvement was the way the debate ran; it seemed much less stressful in how it was run this year — in particular last year we had problems working out how to pass on our answers during the debate, and I think we had less time to give answers too. This time the main difficulty was that the second phase of the debate only allowed 1m30 to respond to questions, which wasn’t enough time unless you wrote your answer in advance and pasted it. Don seems interested in running some more debates through the year on other topics, so that might give us a chance to make some more improvements to how we run these things.

The -vote discussion this year seemed a lot more muted than last time: for instance, the March 2005 archives included some 900 messages, while this year there’ve been just under 500 so far. Top posters this year were: Anthony Towns (49), Jeroen van Wolffelaar (34), Martin (Joey) Schulze (30), Steve McIntyre (28), Andreas Schuldei (28), Ted Walther (20), Matthew Garrett(20), Bill Allombert (16), MJ Ray (15), Martin Krafft (14), Steve Langasek (14). (Ari posted 8 mails, another six developers posted more than him, but fewer than Steve) So not only much less divergence between how much the candidates had to say than last year, but also most of the posts were by candidates rather than other developers.

One thing I’m left wondering is how much of the controversies in the debate, and in Debian in general, are really what they purport to be, and how many are more along the lines of personality clashes, or unresolved and ongoing grudges. Marc Haber’s comment seemed particularly applicable:

Yes, the problem that we have with ftpmaster are not solved by better communication. They can probably be mitigated, but frankly, I don’t see that there is any way to solve the ftpmaster issues with the current cast of characters.

If you’re at the point where no matter what happens, it’ll never be enough unless you have someone’s resignation, is that about doing the job right, or about one-upmanship and proving who’s the dominant male? To take another example, consider Joss’s comment on my resignation as release manager in 2004:

As time has passed, I’m afraid I can’t come up with real examples, but the feeling of a huge improvement when Steve took the job remains.

Had I not stepped down but otherwise everything had happened in exactly the same way — with me treating everyone the same as Colin and Steve treated them, and sarge not releasing for another ten months — I wonder if there would still have been a feeling of huge improvement. Personally, I suspect not, and that leads me to think that those perceptions aren’t actually getting at the real problem, and are probably a distraction from it. If the real thing that annoys people is my strong opinions, there’s not much point telling me to be more transparent instead. I wonder how much chance for cooperation gets lost when these confrontations metastasise into more traditional complaints that aren’t actually the real cause.

Though, even if it’s not the real issue, at least “be more transparent” is a specific suggestion for improvement, and is to be appreciated for that. In contrast, take MJ Ray’s criticisms of Steve and Ari: “Did something I dislike a lot”. At least his criticism of me was a little more precise, namely “Lost my vote on Wed, 17 Aug 2005.” which at least lets me have a guess at what he’s going on about. I came up with a few from around that time — there was the discussion on the “DCC Alliance” on -project, though nothing I could see that matched that date, and there was a flamewar on -private but I don’t seem to have posted much to that at all. OTOH, I did post to my blog, and the 17th also seems to have been around the time that the debbugs CSS got updated to its slick new look. But my best guess at what lost me MJ’s vote seems to have been my mail to FSF Europe (cc’ed to debian-email, archives available to developers on master), in response to trying to work out how to consult Debian on the GPLv3 after concerns that the FSF had been “mobbed off” the debian-legal list in the past; in the interests of transparency, deliberative democracy, etc, here’s that mail:

From: Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>
Resent-Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 02:33:29 -0500 (CDT)

On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 06:21:17PM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
> > Do you know anyone you would suggest as mediator on this?
> I'd ask mjray, who's also on friends.

Uh, MJ Ray's not exactly known for his mediation abilities is he?
Mako (http://mako.cc; mako@debian.org) would seem like a much better bet,
though he's not European.

Interestingly, I only sent that mail on the suggestion of someone who’s on one of the DPL teams this year, both of which MJ looks likely to rank above me.

In any event, focussing on the personal is probably an inevitable consequence of “leadership” elections though — one of the obvious questions that gets asked is “what makes you so special?”, and, for me at least, that’s been a bit hard to answer this year, because I’m actually fairly happy with all the candidates this year. Beyond that the whole idea of saying “this is my idea, not theirs, and my ideas are better than theirs” seems antithetical to the whole open source philosophy anyway. Why do we spend three weeks having our prospective leaders tear down each others’ ideas rather than work on integrating them and improving them? How does that actually make any sense at all?

Bdale’s been making a similar point at the conferences I’ve seen him at over the past year, with a view to moving from a single DPL into some sort of leadership group, but so far we haven’t really had any serious idea how to do that beyond “have the elected DPL recruit a team”, which still suffers from many of the same flaws.

One thing that really surprised me is that without exception, every candidate this year proposed some sort of speech limitations — whether it be Andreas or Jeroen or Steve’s “code of conduct”, or Bill’s “rules for better communications”. Even Ari warned of kitten-killing domukuns (domuki?), and Ted appears to be concerned at reducing the amount of religious discrimination occurring on lists.

Happily, there seems to be a similar level of interest in the ideas from my platform, with the “vitality” concept being similar to David Nusinow’s ideas on momentum and Lars Wirzenius’s thoughts on