On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 4:50 AM, Alex Leverington <nessence at gmail.com> wrote: > > What are the (your) objectives and expectations behind restructuring > the community?
This is something that I meant to put together a few words on - why do we need to do this. I don't see this as a restructuring of the community so much as a rationialization and simplification of the way we drive the community. One of the problems we've had is that anyone wanting to create a project or get together a community to do stuff has ended up wading through a constitutional quagmire. That's got to stop. People want to do stuff? We should be cheering them on! (You want to develop a cool app in OpenSolaris? First you have to find a legitimate community group. Then you have to put together a proposal, it has to be voted on by the Core Contributors, you have to hope that they all agree and can be bothered to vote, and then you get permission to go to the next level. I deliberately got my own project founded before we had rules. Interestingly, the constitution says nothing about project creation so we could just adopt any rules we choose.) > It seems that Peter's proposal addresses suffrage in what appears to > be accepted by most. I see proposals for ownership, monitoring, and > authority yet I can't myself correlate these to a prominent issue. I > would like to know what the purpose of these additional proposals serve. > > This is what I have so far: > - collectively work towards 6 month release cycle (managing objectives/ > tasks) That's one particular project. The fact that it happens to confusingly have the same name of the community doesn't mean that it is the only function of the community - the community has much larger scope. > - consolidating competing efforts (arguably a technical issue of > taxonomy) This is a duplication question? I don't see this as an issue. For one, I'm sure that Sun management will make sure that they aren't paying engineers to work on unnecessarily duplication of effort; for another competing efforts are *good* - one of the advantages of opening up the community is that it allows alternative approaches to be explored. > - addressing conflicting efforts (typically ownership) See above. > - addressing suffrage (initially addressed by Peter's proposal) > > I would like to add to this list anything which is pertinent regarding > restructuring. As far as restructuring goes, I would like to see less structure imposed, with more structure growing naturally and organically - the community should be self-organizing. Trying to force that into the straitjacket of the current constitution (which we might have interpreted too strictly) rather than simply adopting a structure that lets people do work is a mistake. And that's why I'm so keen to get community governance separated from day to day development. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
