Making Community Decisions Without Consensus - George Dunlap, Citrix Systems UK
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2017-04-04

Making Community Decisions Without Consensus - George Dunlap, Citrix Systems UK

Healthy open-source communities usually include a wide range of people with very different ideologies, goals, values, and points of view; from anarchists to CEOs of major corporations. The normal approach for making decisions that affect the entire community should be an attempt to reach consensus through discussion. But what if you're attempting to make a decision which is critically important, but for which you know there are irreconcilable differences in the community? The Xen Project community had such a decision to make in the wake of the XSA-7 security issue. This talk will cover the approach we took which (we think) allowed us to find a "center of gravity" for the community, and allowed everyone to feel that their viewpoint was considered, in the spite of the lack of any option with clear consensus. We hope this will help other communities navigate similarly difficult waters.

About George Dunlap

George Dunlap worked with the Xen project while a graduate student at the University of Michigan before receiving his PhD in 2006. He is currently working as Staff Software Engineer for Citrix on the open-source Xen team in Cambridge, England. He has done work in many areas of Xen, including performance analysis, scheduling, and memory management. He writes technical articles regularly for the xenproject.org blog, including one describing in detail the Intel SYSRET vulnerability, and has had articles published in Linux.com. George Dunlap is an experienced technical speaker. Venues include academic conferences (OSDI and VEE), project-focused conferences (Xen Summit), general open-source conferences (FOSDEM, LinuxCon), and customer training sessions for Citrix.