[CSL board] harder topics

[Dan MacNeil]

A person who has often provided helpful criticism in the past said:

	"No, I didn't follow the link, they are often long an boring."

After a bit of browbeating, my helpful friend followed the link and
allowed it was neither long or boring.

For your ease, the (short) text is pasted below.

Discussion or monologue  on harder topics like: "balancing survival with
selling out" or "Small business savvy board members I have recruited",
would be cool.

This is a "more better" request **NOT** an expression of
dissatisfaction. Y'all are doing a good job with stuff like the $25/hr
mandate.  Also, I own much of length of previous bylaws/procedures
discussion.


THE SOFTER THE TOPIC THE LONGER THE DEBATE
Although discussion can meander in any topic, the probability of
meandering goes up as the technical difficulty of the topic goes down.
After all, the greater the technical difficulty, the fewer participants
can really follow what's going on. Those who can are likely to be the
most experienced developers, who have already taken part in such
discussions thousands of times before, and know what sort of behavior is
likely to lead to a consensus everyone can live with.

Thus, consensus is hardest to achieve in technical questions that are
simple to understand and easy to have an opinion about, and in "soft"
topics such as organization, publicity, funding, etc. People can
participate in those arguments forever, because there are no
qualifications necessary for doing so, no clear ways to decide (even
afterward) if a decision was right or wrong, and because simply
outwaiting other discussants is sometimes a successful tactic.

The principle that the amount of discussion is inversely proportional to
the complexity of the topic has been around for a long time, and is
known informally as the Bikeshed Effect. Here is Poul-Henning Kamp's
explanation of it, from a now-famous post made to BSD developers:

    It's a long story, or rather it's an old story, but it is quite
short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a book in the early
1960'ies, called "Parkinson's Law", which contains a lot of insight into
the dynamics of management.

    [...]

    In the specific example involving the bike shed, the other vital
component is an atomic power-plant, I guess that illustrates the age of
the book.

    Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get
approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic
power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up
in endless discussions.

    Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast,
so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather
than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked
all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a
couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to
Los Alamos in his books.

    A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a
weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how
well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal,
somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he
is paying attention, that he is here.

    In Denmark we call it "setting your fingerprint". It is about
personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere
and say "There! I did that." It is a strong trait in politicians, but
present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in
wet cement.

(His complete post is very much worth reading, too. See Appendix C, Why
Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?; see also http://bikeshed.com.)

Anyone who's ever taken regular part in group decision-making will
recognize what Kamp is talking about. However, it is usually impossible
to persuade everyone to avoid painting bikesheds. The best you can do is
point out that the phenomenon exists, when you see it happening, and
persuade the senior developers—the people whose posts carry the most
weight—to drop their paintbrushes early, so at least they're not
contributing to the noise. Bikeshed painting parties will never go away
entirely, but you can make them shorter and less frequent by spreading
an awareness of the phenomenon in the project's culture.