[Ubuntu] UbuntuGIS PSC Creation

[Alex Mandel]

On 11/13/2013 02:58 AM, Hamish wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Alex:
>> and even making sure we have 1 person who is both DebianGIS and
>> Ubuntugis for coordination.
> 
> without getting too presumptuous, Frankie L. is an obvious person to
> approach, but failing that that a crossover person could be me, but
> tbh I'm not really sure how a PSC would actually benefit UbuntuGIS or
> OSGeo. A PSC is good for making strategic and political decisions, but
> 95% of our issues are technical ones where the wider pool of
> developers participate in "may the soundest idea win". The main
> strategic decision we have right now is the repo re-naming, which I
> think most of us are in fair agreement about anyway.
> 
> I'm all for breathing life into the project in whatever way we can,
> but at the same time am concerned about adding new layers of
> bureaucracy which might morph into a time+energy sink/inefficiency,
> and avoiding the situation of too many chiefs & not enough braves.
> Another thing to be concerned with in small groups like ours is to
> avoid the appearance of a cabal, where new contributors don't feel
> part of the technical decision making group, and we desperately need
> those new contributors to be part of the technical decision making
> group.. On the other hand I fully accept Alan's concerns about his
> bus factor, in DebianGIS for a long time we've relied on Frankie
> in the same way.
> 
> 
> just some thoughts,
> Hamish
> 

Agreed the PSC isn't about trying to exclude people from the
discussions. In fact I would suggest that even though a PSC is being
created there are no PSC only discussions and that just because a PSC
exists does not mean it has to have the only votes that count. We can
easily say the rule is we take the community decision that is 95-100% in
agreement (essentially consensus of participants).

There are only a few key things the PSC handles:
Adding/Approving Committers/Uploaders
Approving the community recommendations for repo naming/roadmap
Admin rights to the trac, launchpad and mailing list
Being the official contact people
Facilitating community discussions
Reminding people of their commitments (agreed maintainers), and
soliciting new maintainers when we need them (see item 1).


I'll note OSGeo Live has an informal PSC committee just by the nature of
who participates in the decisions: Hamish, Angelos, Cameron, Brian and me
And we already operate in a similar manner where technical issues are
openly discussed until we reach a conclusion everyone agrees to (or
doesn't outright object to).

I'm not too concerned about too many Chiefs in this particular project.
We mostly just want to improve the efficiency since right now packaging
uploading is completely on the fly which leads to some duplication of
effort or standing around and waiting when know one knows who's planning
to upload what or when.

I'd probably be the only Chief since I still haven't managed to
successfully upload what should be simple updates, everyone else here
seems to have a handle on how to get packages in.

Thanks,
Alex