Hi there,
* ESC tender project proposal process (Thorsten)
+ proposal would be: (Thorsten)
+ share the draft in public: see
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/YprpsFP45z7a7p3
I spend a little time reading and thinking about them a bit; here is
where I got to with an hour or so:
Good:
+ as I understand it this allows all of the ESC members to rank
proposals - while only those without a (very theoretical) COI
can vote on that as a recommendation to the board.
+ if so - that should be made more explicit in the
Ranking text: "all members of the ESC can rank
proposals."
Easy to improve:
+ the staff should have a formal role in ensuring that the
"Ordinary Procedure" takes place in a timely way, with
announcements clearly signaled, community informed,
deadlines well presented etc.
+ as many 'MUST's that involve deadlines should fall
on paid staff not volunteer ESC members.
+ it is a typical, external misunderstanding that
the ESC is some top-down command & control thing,
better to think of it as a group of friends
meeting up.
+ Staff voting
+ due to the excessive exclusion rules, paid TDF staff
will inevitably become the overwhelmingly dominant
voting block in the ESC on tendering.
+ as such - staff must be protected from fear of
consequences of voting any given way in the ESC.
+ it should be made clear that they are there as
individuals and volunteers; that they cannot be
instructed to vote any given way, and that any
retaliation in the management chain to the board
will be treated severely.
+ possibly this belongs in a simple covenant from
TDF - and not here, but - it is worth saying,
and it goes without saying that my understanding is
that all paid staff are treated like this anyway.
Easy typo:
+ s/Form Tendering/From Tendering/
'MUST' be improved:
+ the unnecessary lengths we go to exclude people: the three
years is egregiously punitive - particularly in light of
the forward looking Declaration of Potential Conflict; lets
remove it. The future matters, for future tendering, not
the past.
+ the effort we go to to exclude people - when the output of
this is just good advice for the board to act on is staggering.
+ the balance seems very substantially wrong in terms
of preserving our statutory meritocracy & efficiency
+ it is not worth sacrificing these to this extent to
try to solve every possible concern someone could
raise: there is already significant ongoing risk of people
using such spurious concerns to unbalance our governance.
+ Effort Estimate & exclusion is silly:
+ excluding the few non-conflicted experts in the
space - who are vital to review the code is totally
counter-productive.
+ if someone is not going to tender, and is not
affiliated - just assessing the estimate
should not exclude them from further process -
such as eg. seeing if it was delivered properly.
+ it is very unclear what rational can be used to
add a whole extra layer of CoI here.
+ the pool of skilled people here in any specific
area is small.
+ There are also many deeply wrong ideas embedded in
this idea of an accurate effort estimate.
wrong premise 1. that effort is easy to estimate - for
extreme accuracy it takes a significant %age
of the time to do the job.
+ such estimates are best done by 2x
skilled people, with a range of
best/likely/worst triple-point
estimates, breaking down the problem
etc.
+ even so - fixed-priced projects bankrupt
skilled consultancies in all industries,
even non-innovative traditional ones eg.
building projects.
wrong premise 2. that all engineers have the same
skill/experience level - there is no
"person day" - this varies 10x depending
on the person even among experienced engineers
cf. Fred Brooks, passim ad nauseum
wrong premise 3. that person days can be meaningfully linked
to cost for a fixed-price project.
+ pricing include risk of overruns
+ pricing includes load factors & other
concurrent bids, capacity, probability of
other bids closing etc. this is a commercial
nightmare; think Ryan-Air, over-selling the
plane by a factor of two.
+ payment risk as well as reputational risks of
contracting for TDF are -very- substantial.
the only sensible determination of price is
by seeing the result of a public, contested
tendering. To pretend otherwise is silly.
4. many tendered fixed-price tasks cost the people
executing on them rather more than they are bid
for - not even the companies with the experts
can get this perfectly right.
+ worse - this quest for an accurate estimate seems to
serve no very useful purpose. It is fine to have a
hyper-accurate number, but if no-one will deliver it in
that time - you wasted your time.
+ I would suggest that we instead have a process that
ranks tasks, tenders them by priority top-down and then
decides on reasonableness based on a number of ball-park
estimates.
+ the wisdom of crowds can give us several rough
ball-parks reasonably easily.
+ and otherwise to completely ignore this step, or
at least explain what extra purpose it tries to solve
+ Obvious hostages to fortune:
"Only non-Conflicted Members can vote in the ESC."
+ this needs to be profoundly (and redundantly)
specialized - in the text - to avoid its mis-use,
and mis-quoting outside the context of this policy.
+ please add many more un-necessary words - Carlo
has made a nice neat text, but the messy political
reality is of constant word twisting at TDF.
+ the sign that we need a 'Note:' here to stop
people panic-ing - is a good one that this
will cause problems and mis-understandings
in future.
+ wherever there is a note - make the text
more verbose, and clearer as to scope at
the expense of redundancy.
+ this will save much acrimony & discussion
in future - the definition of Conflicted here
is excessively broad for no obvious reason, it
should not be widely applied.
With those fixed, it looks fine - plenty of non-controversial &
well drafted stuff in there. In fact - I'm rather pleased with the tone,
approach and balance in general - it's refreshing.
Since the ESC has (as yet) not been poisoned, and still works by
consensus - it seems good to build a social solution on top of that here
that can work well to avoid the (AFAICS) totally theoretical problem of
people advising the board to invest in one thing or another.
As I said in the call, there are ideas to have simpler ways to
avoid all of this legalese: for example having the Trustees vote on
things they particularly like / want - although - generally (having
helped to run the ranking in the past) - it is like pulling teeth even
getting enough individuals of the ESC to spend the hour(s) it takes to
read all the proposals, give them a fair hearing and provide a sensible
ranking for them. Possibly this could be a bonus for membership.
Then again the ESC has traditionally focused on on-sexy, technical
debt type things that we can be sure no-one else will be able to do for
fun / afford.
Regards,
Michael.
--
michael.meeks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <><, GM Collabora Productivity
Hangout: mejmeeks@xxxxxxxxx, Skype: mmeeks
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