Motion to encourage staff delegation of responsibility

May 31 20:52 UTC 2003

A motion:


In order to alter the perception and reality of Grex's culture of 
nonresponsiveness to less-than-emergency priority requests, Grex's root 
staff are hereby expressly permitted and encouraged to unilaterally 
appoint people to non-root admin positions, subject to the appointing 
root staff person's judgement about the good character and motives of 
potential appointees.


Submitted at ~5:00pm EDT on 31 May 2003.
Discussion will conclude and voting on the proposal shall commence
at ~5:00pm EDT on 14 June 2003, with thanks to the voteadm.

response 2 of 120:

May 31 22:00 UTC 2003

I like the proposal.  

I don't think explicitly requiring notification is necessary, since we
should be able to rely upon staff to keep each other informed of their
actions.

response 4 of 120:

Jun 1 00:17 UTC 2003

Trust has less to do with it than just keeping people informed.  Joe's
probably right that they'll do that anyway, but it wouldn't hurt to make
it explicit (or at least say they're encouraged or something).

response 6 of 120:

Jun 1 03:11 UTC 2003

Right.  But how is this different from all of the other things the staff
does?  Yes, staff *should* keep one another informed, both to prevent
duplication of effort and to make sure that things actually do get done.

I don't *object* to adding an explicit requirement for notification to
this proposal; I simply consider it unnecessary.  On the other hand,
the question has been raised, so maybe it is necessary.

response 8 of 120:

Jun 1 06:39 UTC 2003

(Eric's on the board, which IMO would be the better avenue for this
proposal.  does this really need a member vote?)

response 10 of 120:

Jun 1 17:22 UTC 2003

The proposal is pretty close to something the Board passed a few years ago:

    Staff Membership - November 16, 1994
    ------------------------------------

    Motion (remmers, srw):
    ----------------------
    Staff with permanent root access may at its discretion grant
    specific resources to qualified individuals for the purpose of
    performing work that is beneficial to Grex. Examples of such
    resources would be write access to selected directories in
    order to modify data files or to install software. In the the
    event of an emergency, temporary root access may be granted by
    any permanent root.

    Permanent root access, access to the staff conference, and
    access to the "baff" mailing list shall be with the advice and
    consent of the Board.

Basically, the motion says that a certain level of privilege requires
Board approval, but short of that, staff may, on its own, appoint
volunteers to do useful stuff and grant them the resources to do it.

Although I support the idea behind Eric's proposal, I don't think
the proposal is needed since the policy is already in place.

(See http://cyberspace.org/local/grex/policy.html for a list of
policy decisions both by the Board and by member vote.  Jan
compiled this summary from archive of minutes a couple of years
ago.)

response 12 of 120:

Jun 2 12:39 UTC 2003

Grexian inertia.

response 14 of 120:

Jun 2 20:32 UTC 2003

Well, news to me that Grex staff has that discretion (though I should know
better if I compiled that page).  Wow, I see we are also authorized to
institute disk quotas.  That's good, because we mean to turn them on on the
new Grex system.  If we're quick, we may be able to get that policy
implemented less than ten years after it was passed.

OK, someone should go appoint a partyadm.

response 16 of 120:

Jun 3 00:31 UTC 2003

I guess I shouldn't have worried about staff members rushing out and
appointing too many people.  ;-)

response 18 of 120:

Jun 3 14:59 UTC 2003

I think the real problem here is that staff has too much to do and not enough
time/motivation to do it.  This is not a problem that can be solved with a
clearly worded policy.  

response 20 of 120:

Jun 3 17:03 UTC 2003

As is the idea of adding more staff members.  At least three people,
including myself, have volunteered.  I was under the impression that
this issue would be discussed at the board meeting last night.  What's
happened with it?

response 22 of 120:

Jun 3 17:41 UTC 2003

We discussed the matter some at the meeting.  Staff was not ready to make
any recommendations to the board, so we didn't take any action.  THe staff
plans to discuss adding new people at its next meeting, which is (we think)
next week.

We also discussed how we could have a better system of mentoring new staff,
so that there is some sensible track toward acquiring the necessary level of
trust.  No one had any brilliant ideas on how to go about it.  There was a
general consensus, though, that we don't do a good job of it now.

One thing that seemed to be a good idea is to make a list of staff's current
tasks, and known future projects, so that there is something to give new
people to do.  Of course, no one wanted to invest the time to make such a
list.  But it might happen - some staff member will have to say where we
left that.

response 24 of 120:

Jun 3 22:29 UTC 2003

I definitely did not get that the staff don't have the time to delegate, but
rather that there is not currently the common perception that staff may
actually do so at their discretion.  The discussion revealed that such used
to be the case, doesn't seem to be now, and that there is no good reason why
it shouldn't be that way again.