Hi Steve, On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 12:39:34PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > While I myself would certainly not volunteer to be on the committee due to > my direct involvement in the DC14 Portland bid, I think it would be absurd > to exclude all Americans from the committee merely on the grounds that > there's a bid in the US. Nearly 20% of all active DDs are based in the > US[1]; they shouldn't be excluded from having their preferences represented > in the DebConf decision just because that preference might happen to be > predictable! The same goes for Germany, France, England, Japan, or any of > the other countries where we have large DD populations. > > The DC14 selection committee is, well, a committee; and the best way to > handle biases in a committee where majority rules is not by trying to make > sure nobody with a bias is part of it, but by making sure the biases of the > project as a whole are fairly represented on the committee.
I'm not saying committee members would necessarily would be unreasonably biased, though some might. I'm just saying that such a guideline is good to prevent the _appearance_ of unreasonable bias, which is a lot more common than actual unreasonable bias and often more damaging. Similarly, not only is it quite difficult to carefully construct a committee that fairly represents the biases of the projects at a whole, enough people wouldn't believe the result if you somehow managed to succeed. If you dare, look at the recent angst surrounding the DC13 venue decision - whatever actually happened, the rancor and accusations are the most damaging bits. I don't think there's any current overall bias in Debian in favor of or against either candidate country, even if you subtract out Americans and Venezuelans, despite various individuals having strong preferences. I trust people from any neutral country to pick whichever bid is best. I say this even as someone who has been meaning to visit Portland for some time and will eventually do so whether or not DC14 is there. My comments here are not just based on general theories, but also based on my experience on the DebConf11 herb/bursary team. Some decisions made by the team were controversial in the eyes of those who did not receive the funds they had requested and some of their friends. There were indeed lots of accusations of bias, since some team members received funds themselves. It's really moot here whether we were biased or not - this is not the place to rehash that - but even the appearance that an impartial decider has an a priori preference or atypical interest in a result causes a lot of grief for everyone. - Jimmy Kaplowitz ji...@debian.org _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
