Re: News Flash: Resignation of Executive Board members, delink of zucchini.fl.us.blitzed.org

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 04:24:18PM +0200, Philipp Kern wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 11:15 +0000, Blitzed News Goat wrote:
> >    This means that the Executive Board is in fact just me now -- a
> >    situation that has in practice been the case for a while -- but I do
> >    not regard that as acceptable in the long term and I hope that
> >    eventually we will be at the stage where the places can be filled with
> >    suitable people. At the same time I will be instituting regular
> >    (yearly?) elections for EB members, although that will not necessarily
> >    be an EB that works the same as it does now. We'll see.
> 
> IMHO we need an elected council to resolve Admin team deadlocks. But
> they shouldn't happen too often in the next time, due to our new voting
> method (Condorcet).

Draws/deadlocks in admin voting has never been a serious issue as
far as I remember.  It's happened a few times, sure, but it's rather
rare and usually there is a sensible route to resolve it.

Without some benevolent dictator to guide things, give pushes where
necessary, initiate debate, act as a point of contact on things and
basically a guiding hand I think things can get very stagnant.

You can exist as an admin by doing the bare minimum of maintenance
but if many admins were like that then it needs more proactive
behaviour by the others for anything that is not routine to be
achieved, and that leads to unspoken EB-like situations anyway.

For example given the recent events, without the existence of an EB
there would be no one who it is accepted is justified in just saying
"this is how it will be, deal with it", and without that we would
still now be in a state where we can't update configs.

Calling admin votes on it would have taken weeks and would have
involved getting people who may be bored of bureaucracy to take part
in more bureaucracy to decide on their own fates.  Wouldn't they
just take the quickest easiest option for themselves?

> It's only the question what other powers the EB still need. Andy
> actually took use of the current powers by taking direct action to the
> administrative failure we suffered off recently. Is such a power still
> needed in cases of emergency?

While I feel that is one case where it needs to be accepted that
there is some person or group who can just take unilateral action to
resolve problems, I do not feel this is the primary purpose of the
benevolent dictator, or even a desirable thing to be happening.

The primary purpose is to guide things along so that the emergency
powers are not required, and it's a failure for the network and for
the dictator when that happens.

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