On Feb 10, 2007, at 7:18 AM, Jim Grisanzio wrote:
In parts, this document attempts to thwart conversation on OpenSolaris, and I don't support that strategy under any circumstance -- especially since so many of us have worked so hard to have /open/ conversations. Also, the OpenSolaris Community is nascent, and I believe we should /encourage/ conversation, not / discourage/ it -- no matter what the issue is as long as the conversation is respectful.
You say "OpenSolaris Community", but you don't define what that means. How do you have a conversation with the community when you have no idea who you are talking to on this list? Is the OpenSolaris Community the people subscribed to this list? I don't think so, since the list is open for anyone to post and that can be easily influenced by an orchestrated media campaign. Is it the people who post the most messages to this list? No, there are quite a few people who only post here because they are not working on OpenSolaris, for one reason or another. In fact, there is only a relatively small number of hard-core Solaris developer/advocates on this list who have a seemingly endless capacity for reading and responding to mail. And that number decreases every time there is an irrelevant conversation on this list. The OGB does not want to "thwart conversation". I would like for the conversation to be richer, containing actual facts and reasoning based on a common source of information, and not just a bunch of gossip around a marketing campaign that is neither informed nor sensitive to the requirements of *this* community. And, when that conversation takes place, it needs to be somewhere that only the community members can post to -- not anyone who happens to swing by the forums in response to the marketing campaign. That is how we can have a conversation with the community. Apache has project-specific "use", development, and private lists, occasionally a project-wide general list, one community list (where only contributors can post but the archives are readable by anyone), one private members list (open only to ASF members), and one board list (open to members and officers). When we want to have a conversation with a project, we have it on that project's general or dev list (only personnel, NDA, and not-yet-announced security issues are allowed on private lists). When we want to have a conversation with the entire Apache community, we have it on either the community list (for development/project-wide issues) or the members list (for strategic policy or business issues). There is no anonymous communication at Apache and no forum software for any of those lists, and thus no transients or trolls can have undue influence on the conversation. Those conversations aren't always pretty, and they can explode at times as well, but at least we know that the persons talking and being talked to are part of our community. We know they are part of it because they have earned the right to be named as such, and thus have a vested interest in the ongoing health of the community as a whole. Easily the biggest problem that I have had with the way that OpenSolaris has been organized is the way that community lists were created without an emphasis on contribution, and the notion that anyone who happens to register on the website is instantly considered part of the community. In fact, they are just observers, and no more part of the community than the folks driving past my neighborhood. I know this is a bootstrapping process, and that the actual communities will sort themselves out in time, but we are at a critical juncture right now with regards to setting up the real project governance via a constitution that will allow each community to form and maintain itself. Now is not the time to be pretending that a conversation on this list is actually engaging the OpenSolaris Community. The conversation can wait until the facts are on the table and the community is well-defined, which is what the position paper says. ....Roy _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
