DPL teams review 2008

[Steve McIntyre-4]

Hi,

The first thing I promised to do when I became DPL was to initiate a
thorough review of Debian's teams. Well, no time like the present!

I want to get an accurate, honest assessment of how our central tasks
are going and how well (or not!) people are working together in our
various teams. I'm assuming nothing at this point. I am expecting that
analysing the results of this survey will point out places where we
can improve, but until I have some real data to go on I'm not going to
be pushed into making over-hasty changes.

What I want from the review
===========================

It's probably best if I lay down some ground rules here to start with.

Firstly, I'm not wanting to prompt more flame wars. But I do want to
see honest, truthful opinions from people. Therefore, the best way for
this to proceed will be for people to send individual responses
directly to me (via leader@ please). I will treat those messages as
private and confidential unless you explicitly tell me otherwise. Of
course, I *will* be making my *general* analysis public when I'm
done. If I didn't, there'd be no point in doing this review in the
first place! If you're really bothered about confidentiality, then by
all means PGP-encrypt your response to me (my key is ID 0x88c7c1f7).

Secondly, I'm human and I make mistakes. Yes, really! If I forgot to
send this to you or your team but you think I should have done, then
please don't feel offended that I missed you. Feel free to call me a
muppet, but please just reply to me anyway. The more data I get about
all our teams at this point, the better the conclusions I can draw
from that data.

Thirdly, this exercise should not take too long to work through. Yes,
I know I'm asking for documentation (shock!), but it really shouldn't
take long for anybody to give me the information I'm asking for. I
want to have the data ready for working with *reasonably* soon, so I'm
setting a deadline just under 4 weeks from now (23:59:59 UTC, Sunday
25th May). People may be on vacation or whatever so I'm going to be
reasonably generous with my time frame here. If you can't get back to
me within a month then please tell me and we'll work something
out. However, please be warned: if I hear nothing at all in that
month, then that lack of data will become a data point itself.

Finally, and most importantly, please treat this sensibly. This is not
a witch hunt and I'm not just looking for excuses to abuse or punish
people. I'm simply looking for positive ways where we can make Debian
work better. I'm not going to be playing favourites here either; I'm
including teams that include me in the review here, and I'd be very
surprised if we don't find issues in those just as much as anywhere
else.

What comes after the review?
============================

I'll work through the results myself and summarise them suitably for
publishing. Once I have data, I'll be wanting to talk with our teams
again about how best to make whatever improvements are indicated.
Those may include trying to recruit more people to help with a task,
giving a team more publicity or hugs (or whatever) so they feel better
loved by the rest of us, or even something as simple as buying them
beer and saying thanks for a job well done. If we need to spend some
of Debian's money to make something work better, then I'll consider
that too. At this point, (almost) anything is possible and I'm not
going to rule anything out.

The review itself
=================

Here's the bit that really matters to me - the questions I want *you*
to answer. As I've said already, please be as truthful and honest as
you can. If you think something is completely broken, then say
so. Equally, if you don't really have a strong opinion on something
then say that too - don't just make things up for the sake of filling
in a form here!

I'm sending this to lots of team mailing lists. Clearly, there will be
some overlap where people are on multiple teams. In those cases,
please send me just one response but reply to the team questions
several times, once per team.

=======================================================================

1. You
------

a. What's your name, and where are you from? How long have you been
   involved in Debian?

b. What do you do outside of Debian - are you a student with lots of
   free time, or are you employed full-time with a family and lots of
   other commitments?

c. How much time *can* you comfortably spend on Debian work in a
   typical week? And how much time *do* you spend on Debian work?
   (Yes, I know these can be very different!)

d. What packages do you maintain? How well do you cope? Are you part
   of a team for those packages, or do you work on them on your own?
   How much time do you need to spend, on average? Are they in good
   shape?

e. How would you rank all of your tasks in order of importance?

f. Finally, are you having fun working on Debian? Why/why not?

2. Teams you're in
------------------

(please answer this section multiple times where appropriate, once per
 team, but *excluding* teams for maintenance of individual packages)

a. What teams do you work on? Are you an "official" member of those
   teams?

b. How well do you think those teams are performing, in terms of
   getting things done? How are daily/regular tasks dealt with? And
   how about less common, one-off things?

c. How do members of your teams communicate with each other about what
   they're working on? And how do they (as individuals or as a team)
   communicate with people outside of the team? Do you feel they
   coordinate well?

d. Are there enough resources for your teams to do their jobs well? If
   not, what's missing?

e. Anything else you'd like to mention?

3. Other teams
--------------

a. What contact, if any, do you (as an individual) have with other
   teams? How well does that contact work?

b. How well do your team(s) interact with other teams?

c. If you have any issues in (a) or (b), how would you suggest to fix
   them?

d. Any other observations about the various teams in Debian?

=======================================================================

Other stuff
===========

That's the list of things I'm hoping to learn more about from this
review of teams. Of course, I'm sure there are many other things in
Debian that you'd like to ask or tell me about. By all means, talk to
me about them - I see it as part of my job to listen and do what I can
to help. But please keep those separate from this survey - it'll help
me to avoid my head exploding in all directions... :-)

--
Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Leader <leader@...>

[Andreas Tille]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2008, Steve McIntyre wrote:

> The first thing I promised to do when I became DPL was to initiate a
> thorough review of Debian's teams. Well, no time like the present!

I just answered your mail to Debian Med team.  For the record and
readers of CDD list it is archived here:

    http://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2008/04/msg00082.html

Kind regards

          Andreas.

--
http://fam-tille.de


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[Frederic Lehobey]

Hi,

Steve McIntyre <leader@...> (2008-04-29 00:59:54) :

> What I want from the review
> ===========================
>
> It's probably best if I lay down some ground rules here to start with.
>
> Firstly, I'm not wanting to prompt more flame wars. But I do want to
> see honest, truthful opinions from people. Therefore, the best way for
> this to proceed will be for people to send individual responses
> directly to me (via leader@ please). I will treat those messages as
> private and confidential unless you explicitly tell me otherwise. Of
> course, I *will* be making my *general* analysis public when I'm

I am keeping Debian Science mailing list in copy.

> The review itself
> =================
>
> Here's the bit that really matters to me - the questions I want *you*
> to answer. As I've said already, please be as truthful and honest as
> you can. If you think something is completely broken, then say
> so. Equally, if you don't really have a strong opinion on something
> then say that too - don't just make things up for the sake of filling
> in a form here!

> 1. You
> ------
>
> a. What's your name, and where are you from? How long have you been
>    involved in Debian?

Frédéric (Daniel Luc) Lehobey, from France. I am a Debian user since
2000. My oldest bug report seems to go back to 2003. I maintain
currently one official package in the archive (sponsored by Daniel
Baumann) since 2006. My Alioth account is fdl-guest. I am not (yet?)
in the NM queue.

> b. What do you do outside of Debian - are you a student with lots of
>    free time, or are you employed full-time with a family and lots of
>    other commitments?

I created my own company in free software services in 2006 and I am
running it since then.

> c. How much time *can* you comfortably spend on Debian work in a
>    typical week? And how much time *do* you spend on Debian work?
>    (Yes, I know these can be very different!)

I would say comfortably half a day on a typical week. Actually it
depends a lot on my workload. It can go from zero to several days. I
am usually working by batch (especially when packaging). The *free
time* slots might be hard to find (and sometimes I dedicate them to
direct contributions upstream instead of Debian).

> d. What packages do you maintain? How well do you cope? Are you part
>    of a team for those packages, or do you work on them on your own?
>    How much time do you need to spend, on average? Are they in good
>    shape?

qrfcview: in the archive, not a big deal, in good shape, no team nor
          VCS yet
debian-science: not in the archive yet, meta-packages of science
                software, in cdd svn, used to generate the
                http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/science/tasks/ pages

> e. How would you rank all of your tasks in order of importance?

0/ work on paid tasks
1/ work on my Debian packages in the archive (and ITPs)
2/ some translation/localisation work (with debian-l10n-french)
3/ deal with mailing list discussions to make decisions and reach
consensus (I do not have enough time for this, dislike arguing and
prevent to be included in endless discussions -- I like voting with my
feet)   :-)

> f. Finally, are you having fun working on Debian? Why/why not?

Mostly yes. Even a lot actually. But I have sometimes the feeling that
tasks that should be simple are unnecessarily complicated by egos. The
solution is often the same: let the situation rot, once the situation
is unbearable, one of the parties gives up, then everything moves on
(it can take years). In my mind _everything_ in Debian should be team
maintained (even the simplest package or task) without any bottleneck
nor single point of failure. We shall trust one each other. Building a
distribution is about cooperation.

> 2. Teams you're in
> ------------------

> a. What teams do you work on? Are you an "official" member of those
>    teams?

I work on Debian Science. http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianScience

I do not know if Debian Science can be regarded as "official" yet (not
much output so far).

The Debian Science effort started in summer 2005 after the
debian-science mailing list creation as a followup to Helen Faulkner's
talk at debconf 5. The same summer I created most of the DebianScience
pages on the wiki (wiki.debian.net at that time), gathering
informations and feedback that people were throwing to the
debian-science mailing list at its beginning.

> b. How well do you think those teams are performing, in terms of
>    getting things done? How are daily/regular tasks dealt with? And
>    how about less common, one-off things?

Following Andreas Tille example (Debian Med) and thanks to his work
(cdd-dev and the recent Sentinel pages) I created science metapackages
in summer 2007 that Andreas included in cdd svn. This metapackages
have not been uploaded to the archive yet.

> c. How do members of your teams communicate with each other about what
>    they're working on? And how do they (as individuals or as a team)
>    communicate with people outside of the team? Do you feel they
>    coordinate well?

Everything is happening publicly on debian-science mailing list
(sometimes also debian-custom).

> d. Are there enough resources for your teams to do their jobs well? If
>    not, what's missing?

I never had the feeling of a lack of (Debian) resources. Lack of time
or man power, yes. I am not sure the critical mass has been reached
yet for Debian Science but new outcomes like the new source code
repository created thanks to Sylvestre Ledru, David Bremner and others
makes current times very interesting ones.  :-)

> e. Anything else you'd like to mention?

I attended 3 Debian workshops so far:

DebianEdu DevCamp 2007
 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/DevCampFrance2007
Custom Debian 2007
 http://wiki.debian.org/CustomDebian/Extremadura2007
Debian Edu Extremadura 2008
 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Extremadura2008

They were much helpful in meeting other fellows Debian Developpers,
learning many useful things and getting things done.

I will go to DebCamp / DebConf 8 with the same goals.

> 3. Other teams
> --------------
>
> a. What contact, if any, do you (as an individual) have with other
>    teams? How well does that contact work?

The most sensible thing would be certainly to have several teams
focused on each of the scientific fields. The critical mass has been
reached in several fields (like Debian Med for biology, Debian GIS for
geography, debichem for chemistry, Scicomp for scientific computing).
Debian Science aims at been the umbrella (or nursery) for fields that
have not yet reached a critical mass for team maintenance (one can
think of physics or mathematics) and at being the general front end
(user focused) for scientists using Debian.

> b. How well do your team(s) interact with other teams?

That could be improved a lot. I think de facto it is not so bad, as
people from teams specialised in packaging software in their
scientific fields are usually subscribed to debian-science (and hence
can provide much valuable feedback), but there is not yet any kind of
common policy (beside the Debian policy which is already much) to
packagers of scientific free software nor coordination between
packagers.

> c. If you have any issues in (a) or (b), how would you suggest to fix
>    them?

Maybe nothing is needed: if it is not broken, do not fix it.  ;-)

> d. Any other observations about the various teams in Debian?
>
> =======================================================================
>
> Other stuff
> ===========
>
> That's the list of things I'm hoping to learn more about from this
> review of teams. Of course, I'm sure there are many other things in
> Debian that you'd like to ask or tell me about. By all means, talk to
> me about them - I see it as part of my job to listen and do what I can
> to help. But please keep those separate from this survey - it'll help
> me to avoid my head exploding in all directions... :-)

I have said above I believe everything should be team maintained (even
the simplest package or task).

Thanks for your survey, and good luck,
Frédéric Lehobey


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