Re: On cooperative work [Was: Re: newbus' ivar's limitation..]

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>> Any interested party is very welcome to approach a developer and get
>> added to the developer summits. Plenty of the people at the most
>> recent developer summit weren't _at_freebsd.org committers - we had
>> plenty of representation from companies using FreeBSD.
>>
>> If you want to participate, just ask a friendly developer who is going
>> to the developer summit to sponsor you in going. You're pleasant in
>> person, so I'd have no problem sponsoring you if I am going to an
>> event. :)
>>
> I have a very deep, quasi-philosophical, trouble/problem with that
> whole idea of sponsor-requirement to attend a such meeting. There is
> just something which does not feel right about it. From my point of
> view, this is a matter of common sense, focus is gonna be very narrow
> and deeply technical. Attendee should go there only if they think they
> will give positive feedback. As for myself, I would not attend a
> developer meeting on the fiber-channel over infiniband optimization,
> but would attend a developer meeting on next-generation mbuf.
>
> Now, maybe I'll just push the door of some developer meeting I'd be
> interested in during next BSDCan, and see what happen :-) The outcome
> might be interesting to study in a social interaction, prisoner
> dilemma related, point-of-view.

Arnaud,

I suggest that you attend some Internet Engineering Task Force Working
Group meetings. They are, by rule, open. There is no procedure for
excluding anyone. While this may be open, it can be painfully wasteful
of time as one person can tie up the entire meeting and ensure nothing
is accomplished. It happens all too often and has resulted in working
groups being shut down as they have no chance on reaching consensus.
One person can't block consensus in theory. but he can tie up so much
time that no actual work is done.This is one of the primary reasons I
stopped attending  IETF meetings as opposed to being active on WG mail
lists where a lot of the real work is done and annoying messages can
simply be ignored.

For a much smaller endeavor, like FreeBSD, this is simply unacceptable
as is a brainstorming type of meeting with too many people present.
almost all really effective projects are done by one or two people and
they need the input of a fairly small set of other concerned people to
vet the work. This has worked well, if not perfectly, for FreeBSD and
many other projects. It may not be perfect, but trying to accomplish
something that comes under the heading of brainstorming in a truly
open environment is a wonderful goal, but really is not efficient.

And, no, I don't expect you to agree.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: kob6558_at_gmail.com