On Jul 12, 2008, at 00:53, Alan Burlison wrote: > Simon Phipps wrote: > >> For governance, we need a rational set of top-level groups with >> which the OGB can communicate. They need to be our "existing" top- >> level groups - ON, SFW, ARC, Advocacy etc. There need to be enough >> of them so that the "soup" is distributed across them without >> large concentrations under a single top-level group, and few >> enough to make regular reporting feasible. They can slowly change >> as the community slowly evolves. > > None of those are 'umbrella' groups in the sense that you seem to be > suggesting. They may be large and/or important groups in their own > right, but they do not have subservient groups reporting to them. > You seem to be suggesting that we have some sort of hierarchical > organisation - that would appear to be a radical departure from the > current setup, and I'm not at all clear how we would get to there > from where we are now.
So I am receiving conflicting advice. I was advised that the ON repository and the SFW repository were each home to many working units of code. If that's not the case and the whole existing OpenSoalris development world is many many unstructured groups then that's news. >> I'm not proposing using "Group" as the structural umbrella; we need >> a number (15-ish) of top level Groups for that. > > Why do we need a hierarchy? For operations, we don't. For governance, if we are to have liaisons with each Group, we will either be overwhelmed or there will be no contact. Instead of that, we need a manageable set of top-level Groups who aggregate other Groups for member nomination and resource allocation purposes. I'm happy to have a proposal for how we do that, but it is neither "four groups" nor is it "hundreds of groups". > >> - "Group" is the class we are instantiating. >> - For governance purposes, the OGB will instantiate a set of top- >> level Groups. Those Groups will organise whichever other Groups >> they need to function, and so on. >> - For operational purposes, all Groups can relate to whichever >> other Groups make sense. >> - For website purposes, Groups can be listed in the sets that make >> the most sense for each page of the site. So your use case below >> can be accommodated. > > That all seems a little vague to me, at least. Who gets to decide > what, and when it has to be decided by? There seems to have been plenty of discussion of that already and several possible schemes. I'm not a "compiler" type... S.
