On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 6:33 PM Andrew Godwin <and...@aeracode.org> wrote:
> It has not. While I cannot speak for the other members of the Board, I got > burnt out in 2019, and then the pandemic began, and so it has not really > been something I've pushed for in the past three years (and I believe I was > one of the drivers of getting that in DEP 10 in the first place). We never > really got into the rhythm of doing it, and I think a lot of us got busy or > burnt out. > > My personal belief is that if something is not working, it is time for a > re-analysis of the situation and a change, even if what's written down in > the rules is fine on its face. > Well. My first reaction to this is: if having a DEP that says the Technical Board is supposed to take the lead in gathering feature proposals didn't get them to do it, it doesn't feel like another DEP saying they're responsible for that is going to fix it. And it's not just the lack of canvassing for features that's worrying; if members of the Technical Board didn't feel they were up to the job, they should have let someone know that. Getting burned out or overcommitted is a thing that happens, and a thing that was anticipated in drafting the governance -- DEP 10 has a procedure for it! Why did no member of the Technical Board do that? This proposal is part of a larger set of community changes I would like to > consider - I am, for obvious reasons, not blasting the community with them > all at once, but I do believe that a strong, visible set of leaders, with a > clearly outlined set of principles and shepherding a community-guided > vision, is the most important thing to establish - both in terms of the > Technical Board and the DSF Board. > > I have a much longer blog post in me about my evolving belief in the need > for visible, servant leaders in OSS communities rather than trying to > embrace a flat hierarchy with mechanical checks and balances - but that is > for another day. > And I strongly disagree -- I think Django is far better off without centralized hierarchical leadership, which is why I wrote and pushed DEP 10. People who want to be technical leaders for Django are free to do so already; there's no need to have to occupy a formally-titled hierarchical role in the project's governance in order to do that. And the lack of requirement for such a formally-titled role is crucial to ensuring other people feel *they* can jump in and start contributing their technical leadership, too. But what's most bothering me is that, from the sound of it, the DEP 10 governance wasn't even really tried. I know people have asked for Technical Board input at least a couple times in threads on the django-developers list, and I've looked at them and I'm having a hard time finding anything resembling what was supposed to happen under the DEP. It seems clear that the duty to collect feature proposals was not carried out. And from the sound of what you're saying in this thread, the Technical Board is mostly communicating with itself about this, in private, when the direction of Django is supposed to be worked out publicly and transparently. That's why we shut down the old private communication spaces for the former "core team" after DEP 10 was adopted. So forgive me for being blunt, but: if the Technical Board is not following the governance we have, I think replacing the Technical Board's current membership should be higher on the list of remedies than replacing the governance. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CAL13Cg-rdfueZarLYZhysCpK58-H1f080uXad1EmWj%2Bt9uR13Q%40mail.gmail.com.
