Tobias Bernard Explains GNOME’s Power Structure

Tobias Bernard Explains GNOME’s Power Structure(blogs.gnome.org)

12 points by calvin_ 4 years ago | 7 comments

> People new to the GNOME community often have a hard time understanding how we set goals, make decisions, assume responsibility, prioritize tasks, and so on. In short: They wonder where the power is.

no they do not.. It's very clear where the power is when you open up an issue on the projects gitlab to report a bug or something that isn't working correctly and you receive a snarky response from somebody who's representing the gnome foundation project.

zxzax 4 years ago | |

That is a very strange way of looking at things. I have to say this every time, but somebody closing a bug report does not mean they have power over you. If you could force everyone to stop what they're doing and look at your bug reports, it would be a lot more likely that you have power over the maintainers. It's unfortunate when a bug report gets closed, and I sympathize, but you shouldn't take it personally when that happens.

If somebody has said something that is outright rude and condescending to you, that would probably be a code of conduct violation, and the foundation would probably want to hear about it.

kevincox 4 years ago |

The main problem with a structure like this is that when individual project maintainers go AFK the project grinds to a halt without a clear way to start it back up.

As a simple example gnome-characters is way behind on Unicode. Luckily there is a script to import the data dump, however it also should have some code updates to support things like skin tone. However different parts have been done with no maintainer response. It isn't clear where one can go to try to find a new maintainer or at least someone who can help manage changes for now until a new maintainer can be trusted.

And it comes back to the question, what is the GNOME project if it is mostly a bunch of self-governed individual projects. Is GNOME just hosting infrastructure to make these projects possible? It is clear that it is more than just that.

So I guess this grass-roots power structure is nice when everything is going well. But maybe a clear "executive" structure would be helpful for herding the individual projects from time to time.

karmakaze 4 years ago |

Was this structure different in the past? Or does it not apply to the selected desktop/shell for popular distributions?

I'm specifically curious how with such a structure a thing like Gnome Unity could have happened? Was this the case with 'a developer' (Canonical) didn't follow the guidance of the Gnome Foundation/Design team, or something else?

Similarly, how about the Gnome 2 -> 3 transition? That's not one that individual developers can mix-n-match. How is the future mainline decided in these sorts of cases?

TingPing 4 years ago | |

They absolutely mixed and matched during that transition. People involved just usually agree on direction, and when they don't new projects spring up.

jbirer 4 years ago |

GNOME people are lost in politics and constant power struggles, along with the hostility and snark that @broknbottle mentioned, making the project very unapproachable to new contributors and the curious.

zxzax 4 years ago | |

I think you are misinterpreting what is a normal level of disagreement in a project of that size. The project doesn't have enough money going through it to be lost in politics and power struggles. It's still very much volunteer-driven.