Wouter Verhelst <wou...@debian.org> writes: > I also don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if someone in Debian > acquires a lot of power. We are very much a meritocracy; this means you > can't acquire power without a lot of hard work. Once you've done the > hard work, you get to decide how you do it, which could indeed be > described as "having power"; but since it's you who needs to do the > things that your "power position" allow you to make decision about, > anyway, this usually isn't a big problem (even though I'll grant you > that there are exceptions).
Debian is not a meritocracy. Real meritocracies are vanishingly rare, and certainly no technical organization that is as lacking in diversity as Debian is should claim to be a meritocracy. Simple demographics show that it's not. I think a better statement is that Debian tries to give decision-making power to the people, selected from among those who are already involved in the project, who have volunteered to do the implementation work. That's a fine ideal, and a useful model for decision-making, but it's not what a meritocracy means. The people who have social power in Debian largely have that power based on their ability to express themselves convincingly in writing: people who can both be persuasive and present their case in ways that feel to others like it's coming from "inside" the organization and isn't an outsider perspective. This is a very common social dynamic in a lot of groups, and it doesn't mean that there's anything necessarily uniquely wrong with Debian, but it's not a meritocracy. People have social power based on their social connections and on their soft skills (such as persuasive essay writing, or being effective at presenting positions in a way that sounds reasonable and logical), not on the pure technical merit of their ideas. I have no idea how one would even measure the latter in any sort of objective way, which is one of the problems with creating meritocracies. The very measure of merit is socially constructed and will always be skewed towards viewing the existing dominant group as having more merit. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87siuiwq9t....@windlord.stanford.edu
