Open Stack

On 02/06/18 13:23, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> Excerpts from Zane Bitter's message of 2018-06-01 15:19:46 -0400:
>> On 01/06/18 12:18, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
>>> Is that rule a sign of a healthy team dynamic, that we would want
>>> to spread to the whole community?
>>
>> Yeah, this part I am pretty unsure about too. For some projects it
>> probably is. For others it may just be an unnecessary obstacle, although
>> I don't think it'd actually be *un*healthy for any project, assuming a
>> big enough and diverse enough team (which should be a goal for the whole
>> community).
> 
> It feels like we would be saying that we don't trust 2 core reviewers
> from the same company to put the project's goals or priorities over
> their employer's.  And that doesn't feel like an assumption I would
> want us to encourage through a tag meant to show the health of the
> project.

Another way to look at it would be that the perception of a conflict of 
interest can be just as damaging to a community as somebody actually 
acting on a conflict of interest, and thus having clearly-defined rules 
to manage conflicts of interest helps protect everybody (and especially 
the people who could be perceived to have a conflict of interest but 
aren't, in fact, acting on it).

Apparently enough people see it the way you described that this is 
probably not something we want to actively spread to other projects at 
the moment.

The appealing part of the idea to me was that we could stop pretending 
that the results of our mindless script are objective - despite the fact 
that both the subset of information to rely on and the limits in the 
script were chosen by someone, in an essentially arbitrary way - and let 
the decision rest on the expertise of those who are closest to the 
project (and therefore have the most information), while aligning their 
incentives with the needs of users so that they're not being asked to 
keep their own score. I'm always on the lookout for opportunities to do 
that, so I felt like I had to at least float it.

The alignment goes both ways though, and if we'd be creating an 
incentive to extend the coverage of a policy that is already 
controversial then this is not the way forward.

cheers,
Zane.