On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 04:46:55PM -0600, John Lightsey wrote: > 1) Do you believe past DPL's have used the power of delegation > effectively?
I don't think the power of delegation is a terribly effective power;
once people have filled a role for a while, they end up with a moral
authority to retain that position as long as they like, no matter what the
constitution says. You can see what happens when you ignore that moral
authority if you look at the policy dedelegation [0] and redelegation
[1] last year. You can see what happens when you don't ignore the moral
authority if you look at Branden's term and its impact on existing
delegations.
> 7.1) Do you feel that section 2.1.2, namely "that the Leader cannot
> appoint themselves as their own Delegate", should be understood to mean
> that the DPL should not hold any delegated positions even when those
> delegations were made by a previous DPL?
If Alice is the DPL, and she appoints Bob as delegate in charge of
whatever, and gives Bob the authority to sub-delegate, then Bob can
appoint Alice as an assistant.
That still works, because Bob can decide that Alice shouldn't be part
of the delegation, and Alice can't override that decision, nor insist
that Bob make the subdelegation in return for being delegated in the
first place.
> 8) Do you feel that more rapid turnover in delegated positions would be
> beneficial or detrimental to the project?
Yes. (Heh.)
I think it would be good having people not stay in a particular role for
over about three or four years, just to make sure we don't get stuck
in a rut or a single way of thinking; but I don't think we should
exclude people from a working team, just because they have lots of
experience. I don't know how to balance those two aspects -- maybe the
team as a whole should have some new members or a new leader at least
every few years?
Here's some comparative time scales, for interest:
8 yrs+ James Troup as DAM (??-now)
8 yrs Manoj Srivastava as policy editor (Oct 1998-now)
6 yrs Manoj Srivastava as secretary (Apr 2001-now)
5 yrs Martin Schulze as DWN editor (Sep 2001-now)
4 yrs Anthony Towns as release manager (Jun 2000-Jun 2004)
2.5 yrs Steve Lanagasek as release manager (Jun 2004-now; asst as of Aug
2003)
2 yrs Joerg Jaspert as DAM (Dec 2004-now)
Cheers,
aj
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/10/msg00233.html
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/11/msg00007.html
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