[Linux-aus] Can Linux Australia survive?

[Andrew Cowie]

On Mon, 2005-04-07 at 13:49 +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:

> Go ahead, make my day, convince me!

Now now, Leon. Don't feed the trolls. :)

> why would I want to vote you in? 
> 
To be fair, the guy hasn't said he wants to run - that was something we
imposed on the thread by way of "this is a way you can participate if
you think we're so wrong in the direction we're setting"

That said, I agree with the sentiment that he does seem rather fixated
on his position.

++

As a broader organizational issue (and indeed one faced in almost every
Open Source project and related community) it is a burden on volunteers'
time that we constantly find ourselves rehashing such debates. It is a
common phenomenon in code projects hear "oh, shit, not THAT thread
*again*. Didn't we just have this flame war three months ago?"

The problem seems to be the difficulty of reaching decisions by email
(especially with respect to concluding such debates), and, once
decisions are made [by an organization / community / conglomerate /
entity / whatever], having those decisions stick. The current method
(having everyone repost their arguments again (and again)) isn't a
terribly effective use of people's time IMHO.

Various solutions have been suggested ranging from wiki pages to task
trackers to newsletters, but none of them seem to have quite the right
quality of persistence and authoritativeness. Perhaps such ambiguity is
a fact of life in the era of abstract information, but it is at odds
with the needs of running a concrete organization.

[Can you tell I've been doing a lot of Java programming this week? :)]

As I told my colleagues at our recent Committee Meeting, I'm not sure I
have any terribly novel solutions to propose to the problem. I am,
however, fairly convinced that this factor, along with the issues of
effectively mobilizing volunteer effort and using an effective
governance structure, are *the* critical issues we face.

If we can address these, that is, come up with a path forward that truly
addresses these issues, then I think we will have gone a long way to
determining a viable path forward.
> 
AfC
Sydney