[sldev] [POLICY] Development by consensus (Re: Question regarding upcoming maintenance on 11/27-11/28)

[Fairlight]

I don't think putting every decision up for a vote is really doable. As  
far as I can see this would be a bit like putting every decision of a  
government before each person in the country before doing something. It  
slows things down to a grinding halt, since there will be so much  
discussion going on that there is no time left for implementation, really,  
since you never can make all parties involved agree.

In this particular case, however, people seem to be upset about not geting  
an update before a feature was implemented.

Right now noone really knows if the implementation in the upcoming  
maintenance will be based on what was said before. It could be something  
completely different. But it _sounds_ like it is the very thing that was  
discussed on the list before.

I can't speak for all, but my guess is that people are more upset about  
not getting some feedback on this than about the implementation itself,  
which most don't know much about, in the last and latest version, I would  
guess. Most probably want to know what's going on, I think.

What would help greatly now is a statement from LL, along the lines of "A  
while ago, we discussed topic xxx on the list. A lot of you had very valid  
objections against the implementation as it was proposed back then. Since  
we need to make progress on this topic, we refined and reworked this topic  
as follows: (Insert some details about what was done and why). We  
currently aim to put this into live in about 2 weeks, unless someone can  
come up with a valid show-stopper condition. We know that feature xxx has  
flaw yyy, still, as was mentioned on the list, but this implementation is  
only the first step towards the new technology, and, once it is in place,  
it is rather easy to build upon that."

So.. I think coming down onto giving some facts is better than feeling  
upset and lashing out, and, in turn, feeling attacked and lashing out back.

Best regards,
  Fairlight!


On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:04:18 -0000, Rob Lanphier <robla at lindenlab.com>  
wrote:

> On 11/22/07 2:12 PM, Matthew Dowd wrote:
>> More fundamentally, LL needs to make up its mind whether it really does  
>> want to adopt a open community development model as it appears to  
>> aspire to or a closed development model as it tends to end up doing in  
>> practice!
>>
>
> Do you think we should put all of our architectural decisions up for  
> vote?
>
> Rob
>