Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization

andremachado writes "Two academic management researchers, Siobhán O'Mahony and Fabrizion Ferraro, performed a detailed scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization from the management perspective. How did a big non-commercial non-paying community evolve to produce some of the most respectable Operating Systems and applications packages available? Organizations without a consensual basis of authority lack an important condition necessary for their survival. Those with directly democratic forms of participation do not tend to scale well and are noted for their difficulty managing complexity and decision-making — all of which can hasten their demise. The Debian Project community designed and evolved a solid governance system since 1993 able to establish shared conceptions of formal authority, leadership, and meritocracy, limited by defined democratic adaptive mechanisms."

Comments

PostgreSQL

[Anonymous Coward]

Those with directly democratic forms of participation do not tend to scale well and are noted for their difficulty managing complexity and decision-making â" all of which can hasten their demise.

Show me the PostgreSQL project's org chart. Show me the evidence that the project is not kicking ass.

Re:Just an observation

[FauxPasIII]

> Ubuntu is 10x better than Debian

Ubuntu IS Debian, for all intents and purposes. They take the excellent work that Debian publishes, do some additional (and IMO also excellent) work to refine it, and republish that as Ubuntu.

I'm completely outside of the Debian and Ubuntu communities, but I suspect strongly that Debian re-imports some of the Ubuntu refinements into their own project, as well.

Ain't FOSS grand?

Re:Some, but not all.

[leoboiko]

To be fair, I think debian's dash package prompted you to link /bin/sh to it since before Ubuntu came around. It's true that it wasn't the default, though; you had to manually install dash and explicitly select "yes" in the debconf dialogue.