Re: Arabeyes Charter Proposal

["Chahine M. Hamila" <mch at chaham dot com>]

Nadim Shaikli a *crit :

> If the charter is there to address conflict resolution and nothing else,
> then I think a simple
>
>   "All decisions that might have conflicting views will be taken a vote on"
>
> will do -- have a feeling its not.

It doesn't and it didn't. Ultimately a hierarchical structure in itself DOES
resolve conflicts naturally and efficiently in many cases. Plus the voting system
itself can't be a simple majority votes in every case (essentially core team
changes).

>
>
> Let's be 100% honest here.  Isam's situation is different -- I'm utterly
> sorry to drag innocence into this -- but i18n and translation is not
> something that anyone of us wanted to do

Speak for yourself Nadim. Moe and I discuss it in length long before you came,
and it seemed L10N was something that interested us very much. I personally
started with L10N years ago. The reason I'm not doing it now is because there are
enough people on it and not enough on devel.

>
>
> Don't see the value of it at all.  The coordinator will be there with a
> title, he/she can do anything else they like and anyone else can do
> the coordinator's job if the other party so decides, if there is conflict
> then 'core' takes a vote.  Hmmm... sounds like what's new here is the
> addition of titles then.

And a hierarchy. We'll work on a cooperative mode as long as it works. It won't
always work (and we saw it didn't) and votes are often long and go against logic
in that sense that, why the hell would I vote on minor issues of L10N for example
when Isam's the doing the work? The vote way is always open, but ultimately and
on issues where there's no vote or where the conflict is only between one person
and the coordinator, the coordinator's view takes priority. Votes are for
important issues, voting for every little step we might disagree on is not a way
to conduct a project.

>
> I'm saying (and I just read an email from Isam noting the same thing) put a
> list of all the tasks (forget about categorizing them) publish it world-wide
> and let's get the job done (by volunteering for things ourselves and having
> others be assigned to us and others as long as the assignee is OK with it).
> That to me is more results/work oriented and has nothing to do with
> titles/control/credit/prestige/etc/etc.

Yes, that is a cooperative mode. Cooperative mode is for Utopia and Heaven, not
the dirty little planet, at least, not all the time. So the charter is there to
be raised in case the cooperative mode is broken, which happened and will happen
again. As long as things will go smoothly, it is not important what you or I do,
as long as we are productive. But once there's a problem, mechanisms have to be
set. A flat structure will simply doom the project because us, within this very
current team, have a very differnt vision on how things should go.

>
>
> How does this charter guarantee results ?  OK, let's not say guarantee, how
> does it work towards a fast-paced outcome ?  How does it address mozilla,
> the dictionary stuff, the xfree things, etc, etc.

These are not to be addressed by this charter. These are technical work, like the
mirroring stuff we removed.

>
> I never thought we have an organization structure to begin with.

It's not necessary as long as we act as one. We did not. So we need one.

>  And why
> would a structure (which ought to mean nothing to us to begin with, right ?)

It means organisation, as oposed to anarchy, grudges and wasted energies.

>
> stop anyone from work ?  If the goal is to get Arabic to linux, what does
> it matter if I'm the coordinator of x or y (have I inched closer to the
> ultimate goal, then good; otherwise do more and circumvent problems) ?

It doesn't matter as long as there's no disagreement.

>
>
> I think I've said all I want to say about this subject - I don't want this
> to drag on (one last thing is the veto still there ?).  In any regard,
> if/when the vote takes place, mine is a non-surprising NO (against, LAA).

Well, if we're not going to wait for the meeting, mine is a YES. That makes it
1-1 for now.

Salaam,
Chahine