Tough talk
Not all discussions are easy. If discussions were to be easy, the bar wouldn’t be high enough for your bullshit filter to be effective here.
During dark hours of discussions the nineties syndrome of wanting immediate results plays its role among spectators: It’s not a popular job to be a dissident. It’s not popular to be critical about a (the leader of a) popular idea. This is illustrated by the intellectually absurd criticisms David Schlesinger receives.
Yet is the critic who monitors the organs of a society key to that organ either producing for its stakeholders, or failing and dragging the entire society it serves down with it.
In Western Europe we traded Kings and Popes for a government that is held accountable by an opposition. Many countries and cultures adopted this system of governance. That’s because it undeniably works. If you have a better system in mind, that can be put to the test, please come forward.
It is good that the GNOME foundation board has decided to increase the amount of surveys. But I have one request which I didn’t succeed in raising before the end of last year:
Although I accept the decisive role a group of leadership has to take, I want foundation board members and employees to be held accountable for the decisions they make. Especially the ones where they go against the results of such a survey.
But this is not up to me.
*edit* They are showing an old episode of Married with Children on TV, I’ll be back in half an hour!
January 29th, 2010 at 1:35 am
It might be because it’s late, but I don’t understand the message here. Can you clarify? For example, I’m unsure how board members would not be accountable for decisions they make…
January 29th, 2010 at 1:51 am
@Vincent: Thanks for your question. Can you illustrate how they *are* accountable at this moment then?
I think different solutions are possible. But when you’d get to asking about what it is that *I* want, then I’ll stay at “just *a* form of accountability, any, would already be a great improvement”. Meaning that I leave it open to others what it has to mean.
To make a few suggestions, otherwise it’s of course easy to throw ideas in the air (and you know I’m not too shy to give my suggestions):
o. How about in case the foundation board takes a decision (that goes against the results of a survey, or not) community members can call for a vote (without being frowned upon) to remove board members from their position.
o. Another proposal that I have is to have a more open culture of and with debates, instead of a culture where attacking any form of (critical) debate is the norm.
January 29th, 2010 at 2:41 am
Perhaps you should have also linked the tread on foundation list? But that’s of course your own choice, and since the bulk of the post does not hint towards that thread you might even have done that intentionally.
While I more or less agree with your insight about board members needing a opposition, I am struggling to see how this would be implemented.
Should perhaps a sort of shadow board be formed that can veto against propositions or elected board members? Or perhaps demand a referendum for some decisions. In a sort of pseudo parlement manor.
We could of course also try to simply trust elected board members to be accountable by their own conscious. But I’m too cynical to believe that would work in all cases and prefer to put my stock in well established and defined systems that balance power in a governing structure appropriately.
Although, (and I am not entirely sure you are actually hinting at this) I think going as far as a proper trias politica would be quite overboard.
To be clear about my own standpoint. I am more often then not always firmly in the “if it’s not broken don’t fix it” camp, but I think it is exactly in the spirit of a organisation like gnome to have such discussions. To be critical at all times and seek improvement.
January 29th, 2010 at 2:43 am
Just to clarify, I began typing my comment before there were any others. I’m afraid It just took me that long to properly formulate and think about what I wanted to say.
January 29th, 2010 at 10:16 am
First of all, direct democracy sucks. Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFDm3UYkeE and have them explain to you that your project will fail if you need to hold votes. it’s rough consensus and running code.
Second, the cost of opposition has to be high or we wouldn’t get anything done. If people would just have to shout loudest in an online poll, they’d try that all the time. It’s wht they already do on their blogs after all. But if it involves forking and actually doing lots of work, they’re less likely to do it. And that makes them a lot more interested in cooperating. And that is a good thing.
And last but not least, every (board or otherwise) member of the GNOME community is accountable. They get punished by a reduced status in the community. You can see that when looking at the jdub story or how many people ignore you on the planet.
January 29th, 2010 at 11:50 am
@Erik:
It was indeed intentional not to restart the discussion of that thread. At some point you need to put things to rest. Except the baseless criticisms and false accusations David Schlesinger received. The GNOME community needs to stop eating its own children.
A pseudo parlement manor sounds good to me. Anything that increases the debate and kills the “a few guys are deciding all sorts of stuff, and the majority is just silent about it, but if you do a survey you see that this majority often has a different opinion” - situation.
I think it’s healthy to be at least a bit cynical, yes.
Trias politica is probably overkill, yes.
I believe that when if you do surveys and the results are often very different than the decisions that the foundation board takes, that there’s something broken.
@Benjamin:
Reduced status when the average political lifespan of a foundation board member’s board activity roughly equals half the amount of time he can survive in the community anyway means that there’s nothing at stake at all. He or she can screw up, and it wont make a single difference. It’s not that we are talking about lifetime careers here. The situation with jdub is a situation where the community ate one of its children for the wrong reasons, I think that situation ought to be an example of how not to do it. As for my story, I think it should be clear by now that I don’t give a shit about people ignoring me. Meaning that your suggestion for accountability simply doesn’t work or isn’t effective. So basically are both your examples clear and definite illustrations that what you propose doesn’t work at all. I think it’s also hard to ignore the fact that there are people, in our community, that don’t ignore me. Either way, when people ignore me they also don’t exist for me anymore (I guess that’s the purpose of ignoring somebody, that it turns mutual, isn’t it?). That’s how I don’t care about them, and why should I? So how is that effective here? Btw. If you guys could try once not to turn every debate into a vendetta, Benjamin, we’d all be very happy indeed.
Didn’t I mention this in a comment above? “Another proposal that I have is to have a more open culture of and with debates, instead of a culture where attacking any form of (critical) debate is the norm”. Ain’t attacking what you are doing here with “or how many people ignore you”?
(edit) Also, if you would actually read what you are commenting on, you would have seen the part “Although I accept the decisive role a group of leadership has to take”. Meaning that I’m not advocating direct democracy at all. I’m asking for accountability for the elected representatives. And I’m making the case that this system (of political opposition checking the representatives) undeniably works and is implemented in many countries as the political system. But having what I say truncated is something I’m getting used to. Please get used to me repeating stuff if you insist on doing that. As for the Google talk about poisonous people: that presentation has gotten way too much credit. Read any book on psychology to get some actual facts on the matter. Instead of just blindly looking at google talks. I recommend Daniel Goleman.
January 29th, 2010 at 11:57 am
I am so glad that you have elected to take a leadership role in the open source movement, by no means an easy vocation. You have shown great sensitivity an political courage in many of your actions. The art of leadership consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention. Unfortunately the open source movement has been infected by left-wing, libertarian nonsense (identifiable by those who pepper their statements with “free” and “community”). Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice. It will sink us as a commercial force.
January 29th, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Was that post generated by a computer program?
January 29th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
@Murray: Is the blog item too clean for me or something?
January 29th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Philip: I pretty much agree with Benjamin about how board members are accountable: if someone does things wrong, he just gets less and less followed. This also means that if he runs again for elections, he might not get elected. I’m not sure that much more than this is needed, but I guess people might disagree here.
As to your two proposals:
a) membership being able to call for a vote to remove a board member: I believe this is not covered in the current by-laws, and I’m unsure if this would be valid or not. Note however that other board people might remove that person. So in general, if there’s an issue with only one person, the whole board should be accountable for letting the bad stuff happen. The real issue is when more than 50% of the board is doing bad things — in which case, what you’d really want to see is new elections, I guess. I’m not completely opposed to this, although it’s a theoretical case in our community, imho.
b) “more open culture”: I fail to see the link with the topic here (but again, that might be because I don’t understand your post — there’s no context). I think we do have an open culture. I think the issue here is the way to express the critical points — people don’t like to have the same things said again and again, and it’s also important to not offend people. And they react to that.
(note that I’m not following the comments on your blog closely, so if that’s something you want to discuss, send me a mail, or at least ping me if you reply to this comment)
January 29th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
@Vincent: That more open culture would provide a basis for debate. I don’t think anybody can a.t.m. come up with a way to express any critical points, within GNOME, without being attacked. Would you claim that this blog post offends people? How then? Still I get attacked by Benjamin. People dig and dig to first misrepresent and then attack you on their own misrepresentation.
I also don’t think people are repeating a lot. What I did see was that people like David Schlesinger got attacked, and he had to defend himself. What I also see are people being blind for and are truncating what is being said.
I see a problem with how some people within the GNOME community, when they are uncomfortable by a disagreement, attack the person who’s trying to give criticism, instead of debating a solution.
ps. I’m not going to ping you over E-mail. This debate between you and me isn’t so important that it needs an immediate response.
January 30th, 2010 at 12:11 am
“I think we do have an open culture. I think the issue here is the way to express the critical points — people don’t like to have the same things said again and again, and it’s also important to not offend people. And they react to that.”
While it goes without saying that it is important to not offend people, it is also important to always try to take a step back when you* feel offended.
Often when something initially seems offensive, when taking a step back and looking carefully at the context and what is said precisely turns out to not be offensive at all.
It is easy to say that people shouldn’t offend each other. But I think it is perhaps even more important to not be offended very quickly and always verify that the reason you felt offended is actually meant offensive.
I actually think this is the most important point on the gnome code of conduct. Especially because so much communication is done via a text medium.
* as in generic you, not specifically you.
January 30th, 2010 at 1:15 am
It’s amazing that you’ve expressed exactly the same sentiment I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. The specifics are different, but in general it’s the same; GNOME leaders don’t like critics.
I think it’s useful to make an analogy with the financial crisis and Dean Baker; a macro-economist that warned about it long before it happened. When he issued the warnings nobody listened to him, instead, they listened to people like Ben Bernanke, who of course said everything was fine.
Now, after they were obviously wrong surely they must have faces repercussions, right? Wrong, their positions were elevated, to fix the mess. In Baker’s words: “is like selecting Osama Bin Laden to run the war on terror”. And who is listening to the one who was right? Nobody.
What does this have to do with GNOME? Well, if you surround yourself with people that pat you on the back, and you don’t let any form of accountability; you run a terrible risk of not only failing, but failing to notice your own failures.
Anyone remembers GNOME 10×10? Anybody wondering what went (and probably is going) wrong? Nah, that’s far too boring, instead let’s all pat ourselves on the back, and have some drinks.
January 30th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
Hey Felipe, it goes without question that I very much agree with your point of view.