Wearing down

Over the years, we have seen a sad trend: Whoever gets elected as a DPL is a prominent, active member of the community. The new DPL then acts as he is expected for a couple of months, but soon thereafter the interest seems to wear down, and we end up losing a valuable contributor. Why do you think this happens? We know you don't have a crystal ball, but do you think this will happen to you? How will you avoid it?


Ari Pollak

That wouldn't be a problem for me because I'm neither a prominent nor an active member of the community.


Ted Walther

I think DPL's suddenly go silent because they run up against the true ruling powers in Debian. Unlike most of the previous DPL's, I was there on IRC when the gutting of the DPL office was being discussed and implemented. Martin Michlmayr in his blog only recently stated what I have known for years. . However, that can all change. The DPL office may have been defanged, but it still has claws, if a developer has been in the project long enough and knows how things work and why things have been done the way they are.


SteveMcIntyre

There's nothing specific about the DPL post here. Debian has a history of causing burnout in people performing lots of its key tasks. Constantly finding time to do tasks that are often quite thankless can be difficult for the best of us, and I'd be lying if I said I don't expect it to be an issue. Setting aside a guaranteed minimum amount of time each week to do DPL work will help; equally, so will setting aside some personal time where I will _not_ do DPL work excepting emergency. Also, I don't have much of a life to intrude... *grin*


Bill Allombert

This does not entireley reflect my experience with previous DPL, so I cannot explain a phenomena I did not observe myself. My plan to avid this is to involve sufficient people so I do not get burn out


Anthony Towns

Being in any highly visible part of Debian puts you in a position where you can get worn down pretty quickly, simply because there are so many people who want good things out of Debian, because they all have their own ideas, and any conflict in those ideas gets brought to bear on the visible folks. I've been involved at that level for a fair while now, and I think I'll be able to put up with it for a year as DPL without getting flustered by it.


AndreasSchuldei

This is a phenomenon that I had the opportunity to watch from near by twice in a row: once with Martin and then again with Branden.

I assume that people suffer from the tension that they want to change things and despite their best effords dont manage, since they run against barriers that they did not expect, or at least not in this form or strength.

In Brandens case there were also private miss-happs which we can only hope that they wont come uppon us.

Empowering the team around me early on would at least make sure that i can be run over by trucks etc without leaving the project in that kind of dilemma again.


Jeroen van Wolffelaar

Anyway, I don't think that the trend is really there, Bdale and Martin Michlmayr are at least still active, Bdale even as DPL team member.

Anyway, I will keep treating Debian work as fun. During the past year, I've seen some difficult issues take away a lot of energy from the DPL team. I will do my best to ensure that the upcoming year will still be fun to work on some core areas in Debian.

I haven't myself worn down from a year's worth of DPL team issues, and I'm confident I won't let this happen this time either. A positive view brings you far, and I believe I have such positive view.


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