Glynn Foster wrote: > Governance is a hard issue. It's not clear (to me) how user groups currently > govern themselves, That's really a local issue. Some are pretty structured and meet regularly, and others are a bit more informal. Overall, activity is increasing the last six months or so, and the amount of content published is increasing as well since we moved them all to projects. I'm not all concerned with how they govern themselves locally, but I am more interested in how they participate in Advocacy and thus the rest of the community.
> or clear of their involvement in the advocacy community. > Well, all the UGs are projects sponsored by Advocacy, and advocacy-discuss is the meta list that links the UG leaders (in theory). More and more UG leaders are on advocacy-discuss now, so I'm having to communicate on all 66 lists less and less often. Which is good. :) It's been a challenge to find a unifying method for all the UGs to communicate with each other or Advocacy leaders for issues that involve all of them (kits/shirts, elections, voting, proposals, etc). What has developed is unique here. We have a CG (Advocacy) that sponsors 66 projects (UGs). advocacy-discuss has about 400 people on it, and the 66 UG lists have about 4,500. No other CG has a scale issue like this. As far as how much direct governance participation we currently have from UG participants, I'm not sure. > Fortunately, that's probably a result of the fact that you've just continued > doing work rather than worry about the Constitution. I think *most* of the > issue > may only revolve around who gets to vote for the OGB. I have thoughts about > that, and how the governance model could reshape if an opensolaris.com comes > along, but that'll involve another separate writeup I think! :) Ok, we can talk further about it then. Some of us have put in a lot of time trying to organize this large CG of UGs, and there are many Core Contributors that have resulted from not only the UGs but also the merger of the old UG Community, the Marketing Community, and the Immigrants Community (as per the OGB's community re-org last year). Many people have grants from multiple CGs, but some are Members exclusively via Advocacy for their work on UGs, and I'd like to make sure that we consider that issue if we are considering a proposed move. Or even if we don't actively move them, per say, but just offer a new space for UGs on a .com site, the issues are similar. I'm not trying to poke holes here. I support the notion of a site for users, and I'm fine splitting up the community into segments that make sense. We are very clearly a global community of communities now, and we ought to consider supporting those communities in a variety of ways. OpenSolaris is far too big for one site and one governance. Basically, the current UGs are looking for a few key items: better web support (we started that by moving them to individual projects), wiki site functionality (coming as per Alan's document outlining the .org restructuring), resources (starting that with the UG kits that should ship next week), easier set up for projects (solved that with an extremely easy and updated UG proposal process), and a higher profile on the site (I have no solution for that one other than a new link on the front page). So, we've made progress. Hoping to do more. :) Thanks, Jim -- http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris _______________________________________________ website-discuss mailing list [email protected]
