On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 05:51:40PM +0900, Jim Grisanzio wrote: > Has this happened before? No. In fact the *opposite* is true. Although > Advocacy had more Core Contributors than any CG last election, it did > *not* vote in any substantial numbers at all! Your speculation on this
I haven't checked the numbers, but I trust you. To me at least, this isn't the key issue, though - saying that it's ok to have 50 or 200 or 10000 Members as long as most of them don't vote isn't really the right answer. I'd like people who have earned that right to exercise it, and to do so in ways that reflect their interests and values. I don't think we should pretend that having fundamentally misaligned interests represented in inherently unbalanced numbers is healthy. It's not assigning political motive where none exists, just a simple acknowledgement of facts. I'd hate to see a huge spike in Advocacy Group Member numbers combined with dramatically increased turnout in controversial elections result in resentment. Our challenge is to structure ourselves so that each collection of interests can be expressed in ways that are constructive. > issue is baseless. Also, I can just as easily say this: I'm concerned > that the ON engineers running OpenSolaris will steamroll the users since > more engineers votes. In fact, it would be interesting to see what CG > offered the most votes in the last election. I doubt it was Advocacy. It may be my bias, but I'm not concerned about this. Not because I'm assigning political intent where none exists but precisely because I'm *not* - if the users outnumber engineers (and writers and testers and other producers) by 3 or 4 or 100 to 1, there's an inherent imbalance in interests. It's speculating on political intent to suggest that one knows exactly how that imbalance will be expressed; I'm simply acknowledging it as fact. At least for me, this isn't about vilifying Advocacy. It's a matter of finding the right vehicles to protect a diverse set of interests. > All evidence thus far on the OpenSolaris project suggests the exact > opposite. The Advocacy CG is largely made up of User Groups, and most of > them are not that active and only loosely connected to opensolaris.org. Which, again, suggests not that they have some diabolical political intent but simply that their interests aren't well aligned with the part of our Community focused on engineering and that it therefore makes little sense to share the same democratic framework. In some places, they might be made non-voting Members. I don't like that; it senselessly disenfranchises people who could otherwise participate constructively. > > It isn't clear to me that all 48 core contributors have contributed so > > heavily to warrant a CC grant. > > > I'm not sure how that's your business. Agreed. > > It isn't clear to me, quite frankly, as > > an external viewer, that there is that much work that the Advocacy group > > has done. > > > Did you read my last mail where I listed some of work we are doing? I also don't think this is relevant, unless he's saying that the OGB should terminate or restructure the Group. I think something is broken here, but not because Advocacy is inactive. > Marketing is only part of Advocacy. A small part, actually. Well, yes and no. At a high level, Advocacy - as its very name suggests - is focused on increasing the number of people who consume the platform technology components produced by the engineering parts of the OpenSolaris Community. I call that Marketing. I accept that people in that field may have more specific definitions and terminology that are appropriate to their field of expertise, and that my gross oversimplification might be disagreeable or even offensive to them. > > Users, sysadmins, and students are not "core contributors". > > > Wrong. The Constitution says otherwise. Agreed. > There are more than 4,000 people in Advocacy. Obviously, not all are > Core Contributors. And that right there is strong evidence of the kind of imbalance I'm worried about. That number is several times the number of engineers who putback to on10 and onnv combined. I think it's safe to assert that it's higher than the total number of software engineers, writers, and test engineers who have made any significant contribution to OpenSolaris content in the past 5 years. To be sure, there's probably some overlap, and that's ok too. But there will always be many more people consuming platform technology components than creating them, and technical excellence requires making choices that are not always popular. > documented. It didn't vote in large numbers last time around and it > shows little interest thus far this time around as well. I'll have to > work harder. :-) > Cool. I have every confidence that you have earned those grants. I would > only ask for the same respect in return for those in the Advocacy CG. I'm not sure what Mr. D'Amore believes. I'm not asserting that Advocacy is making meritless Core Contributors. I'm worried about the things I've written here, and I'm worried about the degree to which Advocacy sometimes acts, or appears to act, as a facade for SMI Marketing; to a large extent, greater transparency and formalism would sole the latter problem. None of this has much to do with whether the Core Contributors are doing a good job of adding to their own number. In fact, from what I've seen, that aspect of governance is working better there than in most other CGs. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
