Martin Nowak is officially MIA

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 17 June 2015 at 23:47:26 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> On Wednesday, 17 June 2015 at 18:35:48 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> wrote:
>> The role of Release Manager and "This Week In D" are the two 
>> ones somewhat special in the community: they're closest to an 
>> actual "job", in the sense that regularity and professionalism 
>> are crucial. You need to "show up" and do it. If "This Week in 
>> D" is not there on Sunday evening, it's not a weekly. If we 
>> have no release manager and no contingency plan, we can't 
>> release. In the future we'll have folks depending on this and 
>> planning ahead for it.
>>
>
> There is a very important difference with an actual job: an 
> actual job with a salary. You just can't expect the same level 
> of commitment from a volunteer than an employee.
>
> I understand the feeling, but that seems unnecessarily harsh to 
> demote Martin, since he is the one that have done the most for 
> release, and it yielded actual results.

With an official position in the dlang organization with certain 
responsibilities, I don't think that it's necessarily 
unreasonable to expect certain things from the person who's in 
that position (like being able to contact them within a certain 
period of time unless they've communicated ahead of time that 
they won't be available). However, that level of commitment needs 
to be understood by those involved, whereas it seems like it was 
just assumed by Andrei. And normally, Martin _is_ contactable 
within a fairly short period of time. It's just that he went on 
vacation first without communicating that. He probably should 
have been more contactable than he was, but sometimes that 
happens when you're on vacation.

So, if we want to place certain requirements of contactability or 
punctuality or whatnot on volunteers in certain positions of 
responsibility, then I don't see a problem with that, but that 
needs to be clear up front, and I don't think that it was. So, 
this definitely seems like an overreaction to me on Andrei's 
part, especially when you consider how on top of things Martin 
usually is.

That being said, I think that this does highlight how we need to 
have multiple people involved in the release process so that 
having one person go on vacation doesn't bring things to a halt, 
and for official responsibilities that are time-sensitive, we 
probably do need to have those involved communicating ahead of 
time when they're not going to be available for a week or more.

- Jonathan M Davis