On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 3:32 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 3:24 PM, Evgeni Burovski <evgeny.burovskiy@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 8:22 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote: [...]
Of course that requires some formalization, but I think it's a considerably better system than the BDFL, for our case.
It seems to me that the effort needed to formalize it is not worth the benefit, specifically in our case.
Well - as a broader community, I think we'll have to do this anyway. For example, I know that Stefan vdW wants to set up this model for scikit-image. I am sure he'd be happy to help draft it, I know I would. Maybe we could do that in relation to this PR, making sure that we set some reasonable time limit for getting it done, say 3 weeks.
It's still the case that this is a novel social organization you invented that AFAICT has never been tested by any F/OSS project, and directly goes against the F/OSS community's hard-won cultural knowledge about what kinds of organizations work well (see e.g. [1]). Now- these are not necessarily bad things! Our community is legitimately different than a "traditional" group of F/OSS developers in a variety of ways, and less encultured to the "traditional" way of doing things. And social experimentation is great -- how else can we find better ways to live? While there's a lot of wisdom and experience in Karl Fogel's book, it's surely not the final word. But... we should also be realistic that when someone shows up saying "hey I've worked out a better method of social organization based on first principles and thinking really hard, it'll 100% definitely be awesome", then historically it *usually* doesn't quite work out so nicely as promised. And it's often difficult to effectively do this kind of experimentation at the same time as doing the actual work of like, developing software. "Choose boring technology" [2] applies to social technology too. If scikit-image is set on doing this, maybe the pragmatic thing to do is wait and see how it works out for them? I've seen zero appetite from anyone else on this list for elections and such. -n [1] http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#social-infrastructure [2] http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org