This will be the last TC Report of the year, expect the next one around the 9th of January.

We're closing out the year with a series of discussions about making changes to deal with various frustrations in the contributor community. They were triggered by a proposal to consider extending the release cycle as a way to adapt to changes in the rhythm of the community. This exploded into a monster email thread and several episodes of lengthy discussion in IRC.

Thierry made a TL;DR of the email thread, incorporating some of what he heard from the IRC discussion. It provides a pretty good summary, touching on many of the major facets.

An additional idea, changing from PTL to shared leaders, was also mooted. This one a sort of strawman to hear what people care about; a less well-formed idea to contemplate the issues surrounding overloaded PTLs.

There is a great deal in IRC to look at, many perspectives and insights, if you have the time and energy to read through IRC logs:

• Last Thursday goes on for about 6 hours.
• Monday introduces the PTL idea from ttx.
• Tuesday morning it is introduced again by Flavio, who hadn't seen Monday's discussion.

Throughout all of this it is very clear that there are a huge number of partially related frustrations that no single solution is going to resolve.

There was a bit of a tangent this morning where I wanted us to zero in on a foundational cause but that led to a paralysis of "all our problems are probably due to capitalism". This suggests that we have to approach this using analysis and resolution of second order problems.

What we haven't got, though, is an aggregation of what people consider to be the problems. Instead we have lurking fear or FUD. And if we did have the list of problems, getting agreement on priority would be difficult. This suggests we need, in part, to achieve some measure of decoupling so that different projects can apply different solutions. One size will not fit all.

A constant throughout all this discussion is the question of "who will do the additional work" and the need for a vastly more effective feedback loop with the corporations that support the humans doing work in the community. Not just with the foundation board but also with the internal groups doing the work and/or managing the humans. Fidelity of communication in terms of requirements and roadblocks, from all parties, in all directions, is low.

We can improve many of the things people have been talking about, but it's going to take a lot of discussion to reach agreement on what each of the problems really are. Historically we have not been that good, as a community, at accepting that broadly ranging conversations are an okay use of time.

They are. They help us develop the shared language that is critical to developing the shared understanding that is required to establish shared goals.

Until we crush capitalism, we work with what we've got. Happy New Year, comrades.