Re: Draft resolution formalising Debian's Associated Project status

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 12:59:38PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > Then that's something for Debian to resolve, up to and including
> > appointing a new project representative.
>
> Err, boggle. Firstly, dealing with that that way in Debian might well
> be too slow. And secondly, the representative might `fail to
> communicate' that they had been replaced.
>
> There is absolutely no need to make the representative some kind of
> all-governing oracle. To do so is definitely wrong and leaves us open
> to abuse of authority.

The general way you deal with this is you have a separation of
responsibilities. So you have one person from the team which is
designated as the official represenative, and another person who can
formally and legally notify SPI that the representative has been
replaced. So for example in Debian, this might be the DPL for one,
and the Project Secretary for the other.

Banks do something similar when you change who is allowed to sign
checks for a particular bank account. It is simply isn't appropriate
to ask Banks to monitor the internal workings of a particular
organization so they can be assured that the designated signatory on
the account is acting within his policies, bylaws, and constitution of
their particular organization.

The bottom line is that we need to optimize for the common case, where
you assume that the project representative is acting in good faith.
If we have a project which is so dysfunctional such that this is not
the common case, both the project and SPI has a much bigger set of
problems on its hands...

- Ted