Resigning from the Technical Committee

To: debian-ctte@lists.debian.org

Cc: debian-project@lists.debian.org

Subject: Resigning from the Technical Committee

From: Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>

Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:34:10 -0800

Message-id: <[🔎] 87k32ufw4t.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Hello everyone, I resign from the Debian Technical Committee, effective immediately. Doing this immediately is for the sake of clarity and for some of the reasons mentioned below, not to cause problems for anyone. I don't believe any issues are created at this point by an immediate resignation, since there are still six active members, plus Colin's willingness to continue on for a transition period. However, if I'm wrong, please let me know, and I can change the effective date. I'm making this choice for a variety of complicated reasons. I'm going to try to explain them, and hopefully I won't put my foot in my mouth or unintentionally hurt anyone by doing so. I'm going to write a tome in an effort to be clear. Apologies in advance for the giant wall of text. If any part of this doesn't make sense, or if any of it feels like an attack or a reaction to any single person or event, I'm happy to clarify. I would appreciate it if people would ask for clarification rather than making assumptions, as assumptions about other people's motives are one of the things that I find the most demoralizing about the Debian project right now. The short summary of what follows: * TC work and related conversations have become a large part of my work in Debian. This seems conceptually wrong to me. It's also not very fun. * Nearly every TC decision decision is now very fraught, and expressing those decisions, at least in the current framework, requires more skill, care, attention, and caution than I currently have mental or emotional resources to do. I am not doing work that I can be proud of, which means I either need to invest more resources or step down, and I don't have the additional resources at this time to invest. * It's no longer clear to me that my work on the technical committee is actually helping the project as a whole. I believe that means I need to either propose improvements or step down so that someone else who believes in the work can pick it up, and I have not come up with any convincing improvements. In the following, I'm going to say a lot of things about my personal thought processes and decisions. I know it's going to be tempting to read some of these statements as subtle commentary on other people's decisions and actions. Please don't. Where I have specific commentary, I'll make it openly; otherwise, I'm talking about my personal goals and emotions. Other people have different beliefs, goals, and reactions, and that's good and necessary. My decisions aren't their decisions, and having a wide variety of different people with different opinions in the Debian project is absolutely vital to its ongoing health. If anything in this speaks to you, I'm happy for it to be food for thought, but please draw your own conclusions based on your own goals and beliefs, and feel free to discard mine where you don't think they apply. When I was first invited to join the technical committee, nearly six years ago now, I was very active in the project in other ways: working on Lintian, helping to maintain Policy, and maintaining a fairly large number of packages. Since then, due to various changes in my own life, my time to work on Debian has dropped considerably. I've stepped down or become inactive in many of those other areas. Being on the technical committee takes a deceptive amount of time. It's something that I kept, while dropping other work, because normally the time committment is fairly low. However, I badly underestimated the amount of emotional effort and attention that it was going to require, and in a way that's worse than a time committment. At the moment, because my time is more limited, governance discussions constitute the vast majority of the time I spend working on the project. Sometimes, when I can find a good solution that makes everyone involved happy, this is fun. But it's mostly not; it's just work, not something that I do for enjoyment. One of the things I feel passionately about is Debian as a volunteer project, as an opportunity to work on the things that we find fun, exciting, or interesting, in a setting without the normal pressures of external deadlines, bureaucracy, and formal responsibility. But, right now, I'm not doing that myself. TC work over the past year has been difficult, exhausting, and not at all something I could call a relaxing or invigorating hobby. The actual investigation of different init systems was fun and felt productive and worthwhile; everything subsequent, not so much. I'm hoping to shift to working on that I can enjoy wholeheartedly. I'm also not comfortable being part of the governance process when I'm not deeply involved in the work. I think free software governance works best when it's done by people who have ongoing and direct invovlement in the work being governed. This was true for me when I was more active in Policy and Lintian work, and isn't true at the moment. In short, I don't want to be that person who never does anything themselves, but who joins all the conversations to complain about how everything is being done. I can feel that happening, and I want to stop it before it starts. We've made two decisions recently related to systemd, both of which I misjudged. By that, I don't mean the decisions themselves (my feelings on that are more complicated, and I'm not going to get into that here), but the way that they would be received and the ways they could be interpreted. If I'd made either decision knowing that, it would be one thing, but the reaction caught me by surprise in both cases, even though in retrospect I should have recognized the problems. There are other people on the technical committee with more technical expertise and more institutional knowledge. The primary skill that I try to bring to TC discussions is to catch exactly this sort of thing, and to try to apply empathy in line with the values that I care the most about in Debian: maintainer empowerment and the ability of people to work on things that bring them joy. I'm not successfully doing that at the moment. It's clear to me that I need to be doing a lot more work than I'm currently doing in talking to people, understanding their perspective, and getting more social context in order to do this effectively. If I'm not going to do that work, and right now I don't have the additional resources to spend, I need to step down and let someone else take their own approach to the TC role. This is particularly true right now, where every decision the TC makes that has anything remotely to do with systemd is incredibly fraught. It's going to be parsed and examined and dissected, and has to be extremely careful in order to avoid making existing hurt deeper. I don't believe I have the resources to do that work right now. Finally, I've been thinking hard about Debian project governance in the light of Joey's resignation, as I'm sure many of us have been. I've also been thinking hard about many of the subsequent discussions and reactions. As I've mentioned in several recent threads, I think governance of this sort of project is a very hard problem, particularly when the project is deeply divided on many aspects of a particular question. I do still feel like governance is necessary; philosophically, I'm one of the people who believes that any group of people larger than a small team are going to need some sort of governance structure so that disagreements aren't paralyzing. But I think Joey captured my feelings very well in his blog post at <https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_leaving/> where he talks about the importance of being able to try out decisions and iterate. I think the agile philosophy got a few things right: find ways to reduce the cost of change, empower individuals to make choices and act on them, and reduce the cost of failure and embrace iteration instead of trying to prevent failure in advance. And I'm increasingly dubious that Debian's decision-making processes as currently used, particularly the technical committee, are compatible with that approach. My largest concern in stepping down from the technical committee is that I'm just avoiding working on something difficult, and thereby making the problem worse. I believe that some governance method is necessary, and given that I have strong feelings about this and keep thinking about it, I should stay and make it better. But it's become clear to me over the past week or so both that I don't have any great alternatives that I feel comfortable advocating, and that I'm exhausted with the discussion. I think project governance is a hard problem, and a worthwhile problem, and I hope that someone with good ideas will step forward and work on that problem. Debian is one of the largest free software projects, and one that faces a large number of hard decisions. If we can do that work well, it would be a valuable contribution to the broader community. But, right now, I don't feel like I'm helping that process, and at times am making it worse. Thank you, all of you, for your trust in me over the past six years as a project representative for technical decisions, and for the wonderful support and encouragement that I've received over the difficult past year. I'm probably going to take a break from discussions and project arguments for a while, and then hopefully will be back to work on more of the day-to-day technical work of the project. I've been giving that involvement a lot of thought as well, but this is a project that I want to stay part of regardless of the outcome of the current GR. I have strong opinions, but I also have great faith in the members of this project and in the project as a community. Sooner or later, this will all be behind us; in the meantime, I'm going to work on enjoying collaborating with all the great people who make Debian what it is, instead of focusing on the disagreements and arguments. -- Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>