[MUD-Dev] Re: DevCore Project Management

[Jon Leonard]

On Tue, Nov 03, 1998 at 07:44:13PM -0500, Simon Duggan wrote:
> 
> I would like to just add my two cents in as well.
> 
> It may be nice to structure the MUDDev Project with leaders and deadlines. 
>  But one has to remember that most if not all of the people are going to be 
> volunteers, myself included.   I agree that we should have direction.  But 
> does it have to be one person?  Why not a couple of people?  The reason I 
> am thinking of this is just incase the 'leader' cannot be gotten hold of 
> for any length of time, at least there are others.

The point of having one leader is to be able to make decisions that would
otherwise be delayed by endless discussion.  What do you do if you have two
incompatable viewpoints on the design team?  If discussion doesn't solve it,
and a vote turns into a tie...  Someone has to decide, and the leader's job
is to do that when necessary.

That said, there isn't any reason not to have a backup leader, for those
occasions when the leader is on vacation, or asleep, or whatever.  Giving
contributors write access to CVS or the like reduces some of the need for
this, of course.  Similarly, there should be a designated mirror machine
for those occasions when my network is down.

That said, what are the expectations that people would have of me in terms
of availability?  I don't expect more than a few days of consecutive
unavailability in the forseeable future.  At what point would we actually
use a backup leader?

Jon Leonard