by Hooray » Wed Feb 17, 2016 9:57 pm
I don't know what exactly you are referring to - but I completely agree with the decision, in fact I originally sent out the message to Curt, Gijs and other moderators to consider nominating bugman accordingly - just like I did it with Red Leader and Johan G previously (referring to the wiki here).
I do wholeheartedly think that these people are more suitable to be moderators/admins around here than others, myself included.
Personally, I didn't particularly appreciate the fact that I was permanently being told by /some/ people that I should tread more carefully because I was listed as "part of the team".
Equally, I do believe in a separation of powers - i.e. I find it pretty unfortunate that some people around here have to juggle so many roles and are wearing so many hats: in some cases, that is very obvious - e.g. core developers involved in moderating the forum and the wiki, who are obviously "over-qualified" on the one hand (because they know how to patch/rebuild C++ code), but on the other hand not necessarily the most lenient people to deal with - despite not being avid posters around here, while (often at the same time) certain behavior would be tolerated on the devel list, especially by those who are considered "more senior".
Therefore, it's a liberating thing from my perspective - and as just another user, I am confident that the people I helped nominate, will deal fairly with others and not be over-zealous when it comes to moderating the forum.
As someone who has helped with some forum and wiki matters for several years, I think this is one of the strengths of the forum and the wiki, because it isn't much of a risk to nominate/promote people to help with these affairs - so that we don't need to face a shortage of helping hands, like the shortage "currently" faced by the group of remaining core developers.
And I really do appreciate that Gijs and Curt considered/discussed my nominations behind the scenes despite some fairly heated debates and my role in them.
I do sincerely hope that this practice of nominating potential successors will be kept up by those who are taking a hiatus from FG matters, and that it will hopefully spread to other parts of the project, especially core development - as someone who's been using FlightGear professionally for the better part of the last decade, I am convinced that there's tons of manpower that could be leveraged if more core developers had done that - manpower that currently lies dormant - having a team of just 3 project admins (i.e. those who can add new members) listed on sourceforge, and no procedures in place to rejuvenate the project, is rather unfortunate, especially taking into account that not all of them are actively involved in core development matters.