[Freedombox-discuss] Working Groups

[James Vasile]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:14:33 +1000, "John Walsh" <fiftyfour at waldevin.com> wrote:
>  
> Hi Everybody,
> 
> FBX is my first Debian project and I am more than happy to use the Debian
> infrastructure (mailing list, wiki) because I trust the processes are well
> tuned by now. Still, as a Debian project newbie could somebody
> explain/provide a link to the Debian processes in the context of a working
> group and how/when do you know consensus in a Debian project is
> reached?

Social consensus is hard, but it's usually somewhat obvious in the end.
In the rare cases when it is not obvious, people lead and are welcome to
pull the project in their favored direction.  Final decisions are made
by whoever is publishing the software.  In Debian's case I guess that's
package maintainers and FTP masters.  If, say, Ubuntu were to do a
FreedomBox suite of packages, then *they* would have final say on what
goes in their repos.

> 
> There are some things on the wiki I would like to change, but I feel it's
> not my place to change them without first discussing with the author, but I
> am guessing the author of the wiki page is not necessarily the last person
> who edited the page. BTW, I have never used a wiki before!! Alternatively,
> if I was to create, say my own use case, with some minor differences to an
> existing use case this would be counter-productive. I think its much better
> to talk to the original author.

Change away if you have useful contributions.  Wikis are live for a
reason.  If people want to change it back they can.

> 
> I imagine that the posts on the wiki's are strawmans which are
> discussed/refined on the mailing list until a consensus is reached. How do
> you know something on a wiki is still up for discussion or is a confirmed
> requirement? 

When people stop talking about X because they're too busy implementing
it (or implementing Y), the discussion will fizzle.

> 
> These questions may seem quite trivial/waste of your time to Debian
> experienced people, but I assure you they are quite important to somebody
> like me who is new to this whole thing. 

Jump on in.  You'll get it quickly enough!

-James