On 06/03/07, Keith M Wesolowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
have very many contributors. In the long run, this suggests that per-Community representation may someday be needed a la the United States Senate. In the short run, it suggests that some communities are poorly organised and led, and those communities will be the ones who are left without a voice, leaving interested parties to petition for replacement or dissolution of those ineffective communities.
This is something that has concerned me as well. Related to this particular problem, I think, is also the perception of activity within the OpenSolaris community as a whole. While having these "separate communities" makes for a far better signal-to-noise ratio, it also has the unintended side effect of making some communities appear vibrant and alive while others do not. While this may accurately reflect the activity of an individual community, it can have some unintended consequences. One of those unintended consequences is that it is much harder to perceive the level of activity that is occurring within the OpenSolaris community as a whole since the activity within each community is "filtered" to a particular level. With this in mind, it is not surprising, to me, that individuals are left wondering about their status or role within the community. Some individuals participate in many different communities on a frequent basis, but never enough to be "recognized" in any individual one. As a result, we may miss out on opportunities to recognise people that bring great value to the OpenSolaris community as a whole because of the reliance on individual community leadership to provide recognition. Recent comments regarding "Projects" are a good example of this particular scenario in my view. I also completely support the idea of a unified set of contributors. To me, a contributor is a contributor to the entire OpenSolaris community and project, not just one part of it. Because of that, I don't think that a status that affects the community as a whole (voting, etc.) should be a status granted on a per-community basis. I also think that listing people as "contributors" in some official capacity for each specific community will only serve to embitter some individuals. To me, almost every contributor contributes to every "individual community" in an indirect fashion. Is the OpenSolaris community not the result of all contributors instead of a specific part?
> On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 09:55:37AM +1300, Glynn Foster wrote: > While I can appreciate how it on a local level within the various > OpenSolaris sub-communities, so that you build up a web of trust > when technical issues need to be tackled, I'm still really > struggling how it fits with the wider global OpenSolaris Likewise. A lot of this depends on exactly what role the OGB will claim for itself. The proposed Constitution gives vast, dare I say unconscionable, power to the OGB and to my way of thinking relies far too much on the goodness of its members and the vigilance of the electorate to ensure proper use of that power (rather than placing stricter limits on the OGB but giving its members greater independence to act within those limits). The requirement for such widespread and intimate participation in government may well turn out to be a serious handicap in a community in which many or most participants would rather engineer software, especially if such an unbalanced situation arises. That's doubly true given that, so far, the balance of power is firmly against those who "just want to write code." If this situation persists, the OGB may need to consider structural changes to the Constitution, assuming it's ratified. What shape those changes might take would depend on the nature of the imbalance and the rulemaking areas into which the OGB chooses to wade.
I cannot possibly agree more with this statement. This only further supports Stephen Lau's post about why the OGB shouldn't be intimately involved in the day-to-day processes of the community (please read the full blog post here: http://whacked.net/2007/02/26/why-i-hope-the-ogb-wont-accomplish-much/). As an example, I would like to see the OGB not have to be involved in the recognition of contributors. As far as the OGB's powers: I think that the OGB's powers should be limited unless they are acting as an arbiter to resolve conflict, or to help guide the community to a decision where there is deadlock. I am heartened to see someone within SUN expressing these concerns because it continues to prove that people within SUN care very much about a genuine, vibrant community existing around this project. (Not that I have ever been given reason to believe otherwise...) -- "Less is only more where more is no good." --Frank Lloyd Wright Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
