On Fri, 18 Sep 2009, Jim Grisanzio wrote: > John Plocher wrote: >> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Jim Grisanzio <Jim.Grisanzio at sun.com> >> wrote: >> >> Reporting is good, but it alone does not address the problem addressed by >> http://wiki.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/OGB_2009/007, which requires >> some level of OGB interaction, as one example. >> >> >>>> What responsibilities are these? The nomination of someone to >>>> contributor status, the voting by the CC's in a community on that >>>> nomination, the communication of that vote to the secretary, and the >>>> secretary's ratification of that vote. >>>> >>> Ratification of the vote? I don`t see that in the Constitution. Did the >>> process change? >>> >> Help me find the right word for verifying that indeed a community vote >> for this C or CC has taken place according to the constitution and >> ensuring that policies (like 2009/007) have been followed. I chose >> "ratification" because it seemed to me to capture this task, but I am >> not at all wedded to the term. >> >> >>>> The first of these (nomination, community voting, communication) are >>>> things that a well functioning community should be doing by itself - >>>> but not all communities are well functioning. >>>> >>> If a CG is not well functioning, the OGB can step in since the OGB quite >>> literally approves all CGs. >>> >> >> And how does the OGB determine this? > > It's easy. Get out and mix among the CGs. Presumable, all OGB members are > subscribed to all the CG lists and the Facilitator list, and active
No, we aren't. I personally receive anywhere from 100-200 emails a day and cannot possibly additionally subscribe to every CG alias *and* follow every thread on there, nor do I think anyone else has ever expected that of the OGB. I am on the facilitator list, which is a great place for facilitators (where available) to bring up issues, quesitons and concerns that they feel may be of general interest to facilitators. Because governance issues are common on there, it is appropriate for OGB members to be subscribed as well. > conversations are taking place about governance. Since the OGB creates CGs, > it would make sense that the OGB would be familiar with those CGs at least to > a superficial level, right? Also, I see Michelle interacting on the CG lists > and with the Facilitators on governance issues. In fact, she's done more in > this area than all the OGBs combined on this project. The OGB can simply > follow her lead. Michelle is doing a great job with respect to this, and I'm glad she has the time and resources to do so and to represent the OGB and bring issues to the entire group when necessary. It's wonderful. > >> After the fact when someone >> floods the membership rolls with dead people from Chicago? > > Do you have any examples of the most trusted members of this community doing > anything like that? Our main concerns, which have been brought up both by JohnP and Peter, is that what you're implementing is not what is called for in the constitution, nor what we want. Before Michelle started the facilitators group, many CGs were without a facilitator or their facilitator had moved on to other things without relegating their responsibilities to someone else. Many of the facilitators had forgotten (or never known?) their responsibilities. I'm going to take an example of bugster. I know of no user who would ever request a strange build, release or subcategory for malicious purposes to be added to the tool, but having reviewed all requests for product Solaris over the years, I have seen 100s of requests from people that were simply misinformed, confused, or weren't sure of how really to solve the problem they were hitting. Very rarely can I simply rubber stamp approve a request - nearly all of them need some sort of correction, whether it be so that a new build value matches the same pattern as all of the previously added ones (to help pattern matching of scripts) or putting a subcategory in the right place in the hierarchy. None of these people are evil - it's just not something they do every day. I can envision the same problem with facilitators, who are not handling grants on even a monthly basis. >> After the >> fact when someone realizes that the foo group simply rubber stamps >> everyone on their mailing list without verifying that they have >> contributed anything at all? >> > > First, do you have any evidence to suggest that the Core Contributors in this > community have been acting in such an obviously irresponsible way? How many facilitators have made sure that every one of their pages is ready for migration to XWiki? I'm sure the ones that haven't are not irresponsible - they could be busy, overwhelmed with other work, or unaware of all the tasks they should be doing to prep for this. > Second, in terms of verifying contributions and making those value judgments, > that's not an OGB issue. That's a decision for the CCs to make inside their Nobody is saying it is. > CGs. I think the OGB has the right to make sure that the constitutional > processes are being followed, but that's a clerical task of paperwork > verification for record keeping not a value judgment of one's contribution. I disagree. A pull model such as this is too easily prone to inactivity, through no desire to be malicious or irresponsible. We all have a lot of work to do, in addition to OGB duties, and it is very easy to sometimes put someting off. [...] >> Generating a monthly >> report is a good thing to do, but it is a bit like closing the barn >> door after the horses have escaped... >> > > Do we have any examples of wild things like that happening in the community > now? Let's just wait til the deadline for new CCs approaches for the next election :) > >>>> The last step >>>> (ratification) is just as important, and should not be ignored or >>>> swept under the rug. >>>> >>>> >>> What is getting swept under the rug? CCs in CGs make the decisions as to >>> who >>> gets to be a CC. Not the OGB Secretary. >>> >> >> In your proposed workflow, it is one CC (the facilitator) who makes >> the decision, without any oversight. >> > > No. The /decision/ is made by the CCs in the CGs. The CCs are making the > value judgment about who gets to be a new CC, not the OGB Secretary and not > the Facilitator. The Facilitator then has a clerical task of pinging > ogb-discuss, where the OGB then makes the CC sign off on the voting statement > and enters the name in poll. All I am suggesting is that that last step be > done by the Facilitators to make it easier on the OGB. That's it. It's very > simple. > >> Add the oversight by inserting the secretary into the approval >> sequence and I'm happy. > > I think its fine that the OGB verify that the constitutional processes were > followed. The OGB should be doing that now, actually. It's easily done right > now by having the OGB members on all the CG lists (or different members > assigned to different lists). But another easy option is that when > Facilitators ping ogb-discuss they should simply say something like this: "We > in the XXX CG voted to make ABC person a CC and here is our approval thread > [insert link to mailman]." Some already do this, actually. Then all the OGB > has to do is verify that, yes, these guys took a vote, etc, and that this guy > agrees to vote with his CC status. Done. Very simple. But again, the OGB is > doing a paperwork check in this example, it's not making a value judgment. > The "oversight" is lightweight, in other words. That's the distinction I am > trying to make. > >> Bonus points for making it possible for the >> secretary to indicate things like "the foo group gets >> auto-rubber-stamped because they have shown they can be relied upon to >> do things right" and I'm even more happy. >> > > As a Facilitator, I am not at all happy with a perspective like this coming > from the OGB. I am more than happy to follow reasonable and lightweight > governance processes, but my job is not to make board members happy because I > can be relied upon. I have /already demonstrated/ that I can be relied upon > because my CG made me a CC, and if there is no evidence to the contrary, that I disagree. They did not make you a CC because they thought you could be relied upon to follow all notions of governance. They made you a CC due to great contributions to the community. I don't imagine anyone going, "Hrm, Sheila gave us some great code contributions, but can we *trust* her?!" [...] > We are here discussing it, aren't we? All of the members of the website team > have been discussing these issues, in fact, over a very long time (I have > documented 46 announcements and/or releases going back to June of 2007). And > we even pushed back the implementation schedule recently to accommodate > changes for the OGB (changes I disagreed with). Plus, we've had multiple open > calls with our website project managers, engineers, and sys admins on the > line, we've published detailed plans and documents for many, many months, and > we attended an OGB call (which for me was at 1 a.m.). We've made some > mistakes here and there, sure, but to suggest that we are not taking the > community or the OGB in to account is wrong. Unfortunately, those meetings now conflict with the now weekly OGB meetings, so we cannot attend both. Valerie -- Valerie Fenwick, http://blogs.sun.com/bubbva/ @bubbva Solaris Security Technologies, Developer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. 17 Network Circle, Menlo Park, CA, 94025.
