ESC tendering policy changes ...

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* Michael Meeks (michael.meeks at collabora.com) wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> > * ESC tender project proposal process (Thorsten)
> >    + proposal would be: (Thorsten)
> >      + share the draft in public: see
> > https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/YprpsFP45z7a7p3
> 

.....

>     + 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.

As someone who has very recently left a large relevant company,
the other problem is that in a large company there are people who
are on entirely different projects with no overlap with TDF stuff.
Excluding ~300k people seems a little exessive when a few 10s of them
may be relevant.

Dave



>     + 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 at collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity
> Hangout: mejmeeks at gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks
> (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe
-- 
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