I am not the only one to be struck with the realization that there is very little effort at building consensus going on in Debian of late. Positions are presented, the active participants rapidly become polarized, and things rapidly head to counting hands; the largest of the polarized camps then carries the day. This certainly is not how things used to be.
And it is not as if the absence of an effort to come to a rough consensus has made the lists any less acrimonious; so this reduced tendency to enter into a dialogue with people that disagree with one has not made the lists any friendlier.
I think a couple of otherwise useful institutions have contributed to this malaise; the first is the constitution. Though accepted with relief and absolute unanimity (this is the only unanimous vote we have ever had), it has its flaws: it is written in pseudo-legalese, which practically invites picayune nitpicking and contentious debate over minor points of order. We spend far more time debating over the form of the trees, and miss the forest. At the time the constitution was being crafted, we were reeling from absolutely any rules governing conduct and any delineation of powers of people in the project, we had an informally defined Project leader, and we probably did not submit the constitution to the review it required, so starved were we for any semblance of order.
The second is stems from an constitutionally defined process, the general resolution: though something like a GR mechanism is a must for a project the size of Debian, the facility with which one can vote on multiple options simultaneously has lead to people just throwing up amendments that they like, and brute forcing the most popular amendment through a vote. There is no effort to compromise, and no effort to ameliorate the tyranny of the majority. There is no effort to even begin to find a common solution, instead people seem to be offended if an option exactly matching their sentiments is not on the ballot.
Added to the growing unease about the lack of communication or
openness in the organization (with the vague muttering about the
cabal
in Debian), this lack of communication (which is what
this tendency not to convince the rest of the project of the merits
of one’s ideas is, really) leads to us making flawed decisions —
and then scrambling to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
So what is to be done? I suggest that we try not to lose sight of who we are fundamentally: we are a group of people who have found common cause to volunteer our time to make the best OS out there. I would like to think we are a bunch of folks having fun — and working together for what is still a common goal. Look at the big picture. Don’t let the end goal be lost in the petty details.