> Im not sure I even like calling it bureaucracy. It’s a process, yes. But we’re not talking many layers of abstract organizational hell, here. Were talking a fairly direct process of documenting what you are doing and how you are going to do it well enough that others working and depending on the project can understand it, coordinate with it, and have a reasonable degree of confidence that it won’t cause undue problems.

Bureaucracy doesn't definitionally mean Kafkaesque. It's popular to hate on it, but good or neutral bureaucracy does exist.

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bunderbunder 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It doesn’t have to mean kafkaesque, but it does mean governance through layered hierarchies and fixed procedures.

In this case a single committee directly engaged with both core developers and the community, through a fairly open process, explicitly bent several of their own official rules to suit the occasion, and indicated cases where further flexibility might be needed depending on how things develop.

I would call that a pretty stellar example of non-bureaucratic governance.

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saghm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Fair enough. I was reacting more to the "organizational hell" part and didn't focus as much on the "layers" part.

	▲	bunderbunder 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have a hard time seeing it as organizational hell, either? From the outside, it looks like the process went smoothly and reached a decision in about half the time they originally estimated. It’s true that that decision didn’t involve everybody getting their way. But that’s not organizational hell, that’s just organization. If you don’t want to contend with other people’s competing interests, the solution to that is solo development.