On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 16:44, Jean-Philippe Evrard <jean-philippe@evrard.me> wrote:
Off hand, I feel like my initial mental response was "Noooo!". Upon thinking of this and talking to Mohammed some, I think it is a necessary evolutionary step. As a burned out PTL who cares, I wonder "who will step up after me" and carry what I perceive as the organizational and co-ordination overhead, standing on stage, and running meetings. Nothing prevents any contributor from running a community meeting, standing on a stage and giving a talk or project update! We are a community, and single points of contact just lead community members to burnout.
Possibly what we are lacking is a "Time for a meeting!" bot.
I am not sure to understand what you are proposing.
Wasn't the liaison's system meant for avoiding burnout by delegating tasks, while staying clear on duties? It avoids the back and forth of communication to some maintainer, solving the question "who is handling that?". It still allows delegation. IMO, there was never a limitation of the amount of liaisons for a single "kind" of liaison. You could have 2 ppl working on the releases, 2 on the bugs, etc.
Don't get me wrong: on the "drop of the PTL" story, I was more in the "we should drop this" clan. When I discussed it last time with Mohammed (and others, but it was loooooong ago), I didn't focus on the liaisons. But before side-tracking this thread, I would like to understand what are the pain points in the current model (explicitly! examples!), and how moving away from PTLs and liaisons will help the team of maintainers. At first sight, it looks like team duties will be vague. There are various levels of success on self-organizing teams.
My context: We have a shortage of PTL candidates in Nova but we still have a core team. I think the real problem is that contributors think that being a PTL is a huge extra burden. I haven't been a PTL yet but I share this view. I think being a Nova PTL is a sizable amount of work. E.g. the PLT is the liaison by default if nobody steps up. And in Nova, according to the wiki, most of the liaison spots are filled by people who already left the community. So a nova PTL has a lot of hats by default. It could be that those hats does not need real work to be fulfilled. Still the list is long. So for me a better solution would be to rationalize (review, clarify) the list of expectations on the project teams. Then let the project teams commit to it either in a single person (a PTL) or by the whole team sharing the responsibilities between each other some explicit way. I can even accept that the project team explicitly rejects some of the responsibilities due to shortage of bandwidth in the team. For me explicitly not doing something is better than simply ignoring that such responsibility exists. I think Mohammed's proposal helps in a sense that removes the need to _find a single person as PTL_ in a situation where nobody wants to be a PTL. Basically removes the Nova core team from the wait-for-a-PTL-candidate state where we are in now. And in the same time it allows the core team to start discussing how to fulfill every responsibilities as a team. Cheers, gibi
Regards, JP