Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> Keith M Wesolowski wrote:
>> 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'm not quite saying that. I'm only pointing out that Advocacy is not
> the threat it's being made out to be by one fellow Member. Now, having
> large numbers of non-voting Core Contributors /is/ a potential problem
> because that /can/ screw up an election and I don't want Advocacy
> responsible for that. And there is evidence that that can happen.
> That's why I've said I'm not interested in driving up Core
> Contributors if they are going to sit home during election day. I
> don't know how to solve this problem while at the same time
> encouraging people to get involved and contribute and aspire to Member
> status.
To my mind, the best way to do that is to get CCs who are actively
involved, and make CC status harder to get. If it is trivially easy to
obtain, then it loses value.
>
>> I'd like people who have earned that right to exercise
>> it, and to do so in ways that reflect their interests and values.
>
> Agree.
>
>> I
>> don't think we should pretend that having fundamentally misaligned
>> interests represented in inherently unbalanced numbers is healthy.
>>
>
> I'm not sure the interests are necessarily misaligned, though. The
> focus of activities may be different, sure, but user group members are
> generally very supportive of OpenSolaris engineering operations. Many
> of them are engineers themselves.
That's great to hear.
>
>> It's not assigning political motive where none exists, just a simple
>> acknowledgement of facts.
>
> You aren't assigning political motives, I agree. I can actually
> explore the issue with you and find a solution. But in this thread
> Advocacy has been accused of "gerrymandering," our "sanity" has been
> questioned, and we are somehow a potential threat to "take over the
> entire organization." When I have asked for substantiation for these
> assertions, I've been ignored. Stating that Advocacy has many times
> the population of other groups is a fact. Stating that Advocacy didn't
> vote in large numbers in the last election is a fact. Stating that
> it's a problem if Advocacy accumulates large numbers of voting members
> who don't vote is a fact. But then leaping into the Twilight Zone and
> concluding that we are a bunch of crazy people out to take over the
> community by manipulating the vote is harmful to the Advocacy CG as
> well as the entire OpenSolaris community -- including the core
> engineers. It only fosters the notion that OpenSolaris is a hostile
> community.
Sigh. I've tried several times to say that I've *not* made those
accusations --- you seem to pointedly ignoring me there. I only pointed
out that the numbers could give that appearance, if there was not some
explanation for why it made sense. I've asked, or rather suggested,
that someone from the Advocacy CG could explain/justify why they
have/need 2-3x the number of CCs of any other group. I understand that
the *membership* may be vastly larger.... heck anyone with any interest
at all in OpenSolaris should probably be a member of the Advocacy CG,
but that doesn't *necessarily* mean that it has 2-3x the number of
people *contributing* at the same CC level of involvement as any other
CG. (And again, I've stated that I DO NOT KNOW WHETHER THAT LEVEL OF
CONTRIBUTION IS OCCURRING OR NOT.
Anyway, I think you've decided that I meant to be hostile. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
I meant to be asking the question in the scope of the larger group, does
it make sense that the Advocacy CG can, on its own, determine the fate
of the OpenSolaris organization. Right now the number of CCs it has is
such, that if it got its CCs engaged it *could* do that.
I've suggested that no one group should have that much power. I think
moving towards a representative model where strictly speaking "numbers"
don't rule over all.
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I agree with that. Currently, the user groups are all projects within
> one CG. Perhaps we could remove them from that CG? Perhaps they become
> individual CGs themselves? Or something similar?
That might help. I don't know. The other idea would be for those User
Groups to elect a subset of themselves as CCs who vote in the larger
audience. Sort of like the electoral college. This was kind of where I
had been headed. I understand that it might make some folks feel
disenfranchised, but short of separating the governance significantly
between engineering and advocacy concerns, I think we need to do
something to put in place checks and balances. I think the authors of
the constitution probably didn't foresee this becoming a problem. At
some level its a good thing... the success of the Advocacy Group is
good. But unfortunately, the Advocacy Group will continue to grow its
membership at a rate far outstripping the engineering membership.
(That's just basic common sense. The barrier to entry for contribution
in an engineering group will always be higher, simply because the
prerequisite skill set is higher. The same is true in other OSS groups.)
> That doesn't solve the issue of having large numbers of users in the
> community vs core engineers, but it does distribute the users across
> many CGs so they are not concentrated in one CG.
That helps, for sure!
>
>>> 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.
>>
>
> That's reasonable.
I'm totally with Keith on this. I think you misunderstood me, and I
think Keith has probably worded my concerns much better than I could
myself. I'm very disappointed in myself that I apparently failed so
miserably to communicate my concerns in a way that didn't appear hostile.
>
>>> 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.
>>
>
> We didn't use the name "marketing" specifically because of the
> connotation. And the marketing people agreed. Advocacy was the best
> alternative, but I can see it's not a very good alternative. The user
> groups are actually becoming geo-based OpenSolaris communities, and in
> the long run they should grow out from under the Advocacy CG. I would
> very much like that to occur. I don't see Advocacy surviving when that
> occurs since Advocacy operations are really very much focused on UGs
> at the moment. Other things have been suggested, of course, but little
> else has materialized.
But at the end of the day, it sounds to me like you're just using a
different name, for activities that many of us have traditionally
associated with marketing. I don't think it really matters in the
overall discussion.
And I do agree that having the Geo based CGs separate is a good idea.
>
>>> 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.
>>
>
> True. But it's only an imbalance if that pool of 4K generates massive
> numbers of Core Contributors and those guys then start butting in to
> core engineering operations. I don't see that happening, to be honest.
See, the problem here isn't whether or not something is likely to occur,
only that it *can*. I don't *think* the US Congress is going to raise
my taxes to 95%, but we have checks and balances to keep that from
happening in our constitution and laws. I think we need the same kind
of controls.
> Most user groups are very much focused on local issues and they like
> it that way. I'm trying to connect them more to the main community,
> and I've seen that there are many challenges to that idea (language,
> culture, distance, etc).
>
>> 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.
>
> Because Advocacy contains the shell of the former Marketing CG, that
> doesn't mean that there is a lot of marketing going on. There isn't.
> And during the entire Indiana issue recently, Advocacy was completely
> uninvolved. Nor has anyone in Sun marketing asked me as Advocacy lead
> to use Advocacy as a platform. During the Indiana naming issue,
> several people said that Advocacy was involved. It wasn't. The people
> involved in Indiana at Sun and outside of Sun may also be Advocacy
> members to one degree or another, but Advocacy as a CG was not
> involved and holds no position on any of the Indiana issues. Or GPL
> issues. Or whatever other controversial issue we've had in the past or
> read about in the media. I had hoped that Advocacy could grow into a
> home where Sun marketing and community marketing could come together
> and an open marketing function would emerge. That has not occurred,
> and I'm no longer even interested in the issue. What Advocacy is from
> a practical perspective is a CG that sponsors user groups. That's 99%
> of the activity and that's been true from the day Advocacy was formed.
> You are correct, though, that there is a perception that Advocacy does
> Sun's bidding. However, there is no evidence.
Perception is *important*. Especially when the Advocacy Group has the
political power to completely rewrite the Constitution if it could
engage its own members.
Getting the Advocacy CG active in the main group, having CCs that
participate elsewhere in the group, and breaking it up into smaller
entities that more accurately reflect alignment of concerns are all
things that could be done to help address the perception problem.
> In fact, Sun has pretty much ignored Advocacy, and at times that has
> royally pissed me off. Yet it seems that the word Advocacy has take on
> the same connotation as the word Marketing. I'm not going to try to
> solve that problem any more. However, I'd like to find a proper home
> for the user group projects so they can earn their rightful place in
> this community and participate in governance.
>
> All suggestions welcome. :)
Your responses to me have shown that this last statement is not in fact
true. I'd really like to have a phone conversation with you, because
I do think we are talking past one another. Maybe in a conversation we
can resolve the differences. But I think Keith has stated my position
much more clearly than I can, so maybe that helps.
-- Garrett
