[Libreoffice-qa] Role of the QA calls

[Rainer Bielefeld]

Hi,

in discussions I sometimes read statements like  „...formal vote next 
call”. I think here some clarification is required.

The QA call has no command of the QA community. The calls and their 
participants are not a formal entity of TDF. The only legitimation of 
the results of these calls can be that decisions are wise, well and 
comprehensible founded, what would be an appropriate base that community 
might follow. Only a logic decision, promising success and plausible for 
the other members of the community grant acceptance. The sight of an 
accidental majority of accidental present laymen is irrelevant. TDF is a 
meritocratic institution, not a democratic one, and that's the same with 
the QA community.

So, of course, the calls may coordinate the work of the participants as 
they want. And some of the results are really great, for example the 
rework and additionally new creation of the QA Wiki and web pages. But 
if the talk is about things affecting other people's work or even do 
something what might be called decisions, the results should be 
presented to the community in clear, brief, transparent way like: „Our 
conclusion was that we should do abc because of def, we also thought 
about ghi and jkl, but we dismissed those alternative because of mno and 
pqr. If we don't hear concerns, xyz will proceed”.

So please think about the presentation of the results of the calls. To 
be honest - my regard concerning the QA calls is not good. All the 
"decisions" are reasoned with "we agreed". That's not sufficient, the 
call has to reason why the rest of the community should accept and 
follow those ideas. Currently for many issues (not only related to QA 
calls) I only see actionism what often shows a lack of understanding of 
the complex matters. Because I do not want to compromise someone here in 
the project I choose an example from somewhere else, "advice" I got the 
last weeks often was very similar to this joke: 
<https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=122133#c3>.

The working sphere in the LibO project caused considerable discomfort 
for me, and because I doubt that this incompatibility can be solved, I 
decided to leave the LibO project. In future I will contribute to Open 
Source PLC Programming Libraries.

Bye


Rainer