[Libreoffice-qa] Role of the QA calls

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi Rainer,

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 07:40:07PM +0200, Rainer Bielefeld wrote:
> 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.

And calls are there to find these. None of these decisions are laws or things
set in stone, they are a consensus of the most workable solution at a point in
time.

> 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.

There is rarely any confrontational decision making going on, but collaborative
finding of the best doable solution. In a meritocracy, joining these calls is
highly relevant.
 
> 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”.

There are minutes of the calls, which are extensive and tiresome work to create
(as is leading and moderating such a call), which should do exactly that.
Beyond that, its always possible to join these calls. As said before, there
were multiple reschedulings to accomondate more participants and these calls
are open to _anyone_ interested.

> ... I decided to leave the LibO project. In future I will
> contribute to Open Source PLC Programming Libraries.

Really sad to see you leave, your contributions were highly appreciated. An let
me reemphasize we would have loved to have you -- as a high volume bug mover --
on the QA calls to coordinate the activities in the QA team internally and in
interaction with other parts of the project.

Best,

Bjoern