Jim Grisanzio wrote: > Ben Rockwood wrote: >> I say now, as I've said more subtly in the past, this community lacks >> real leadership. Not since the demise of Tonic, loss of Madam Claire >> Giordano, Mr. Roy Fielding, Mr. Keith Wesolowski, et al, have we had >> such leadership as during our Pilot. >> >> In the pilot we set forth great and noble goals for our community and >> for ourselves. Since that time we have only retreated further and >> further from them, losing valuable and noble persons in the wake. > > > The pilot was a closed program of 300 people on 10 lists. It was tiny. > And it took a 12 months of working every day to get to that point. And > during that time, OpenSolaris was a very small project inside Sun. We > are open now and have over 350 lists with about 15,000 people on those > lists -- not to mention all the stuff going on outside opensolaris.org > around the world. Things are very different now, but we are not > necessarily less noble. > > We always expected that the project would grow to involve a great many > levels of the company and, hopefully, the community. And it certainly > has. Things are distributed now and so is the leadership model. I > don`t see a problem with that. Now, you could argue with the > leadership of any given area, sure, but hey, that`s sport and we all > do that. From a community perspective, though, I see leaders all over > the place. They are emerging from the bottom up based on their work in > various projects or in a given geography. There is no /single/ leader, > though, and no /single/ individual or team runs everything on > OpenSolaris around the world. Again, I don`t see a problem with that. > It`s a characteristic of this project. Actually, I see it as an > opportunity for people to take leadership roles by simply digging in > and doing the work we all know needs doing.
The coupling of the two entities is significantly degraded. The community was, during and shortly after the pilot, making decisions together with SMI. This was the result of individuals within Tonic actively ensuring that the community was involved in the process. The community was involved with the charter, with the constitution, with the SCA, with the CDDL. Within advocacy, the community was involved with event planning and such. We had a seat at the table. As personnel changes occurred it became clear that the persons who'd be ensuring we had a seat were being replaced with people who didn't share the same perspective. This reality became most clear with the trademark dispute. We had gone from participants with SMI to simply observers of it. The OGB was then our inroad to mend this situation, however it has become clear that there is no interest in doing so. I strongly believe this to be due to the fact that SMI employees are standing in both worlds, and ignorant of their duty to not simply speak for both parties but to bridge them together. More and more, I find myself learning of internal decisions "off the record" or via back channels. Information that should be distributed by the OGB. While, indeed, we have distributed linkage to individual technical efforts, the communication between SMI and the community in general regarding OpenSolaris is lost. I don't even know who is still in tonic. I have no idea what Vincent Murphy is doing, and similarly had little visibility of his previous 2 predecessors. There are internal meetings and plans with regard to OpenSolaris and they do not percolate out of the walls. I'll include a personal advocacy example... we, as a community, used to plan the CommunityOne OpenSolaris Track... no longer. Prior to Sun's acquisition of MySQL I represented OpenSolaris at the MySQL Users Conf for years. So on and so forth. Evangelism used to be a joint effort, now its all just handled by SMI. The community stopped being an advantage and started to be a hindrance. Did I change? Did we change? Or did the bonds between the community and SMI rot away in our hands? .... but look, I want to ensure we don't loose perspective in all of this or that my intentions are misinterpreted. The sky isn't falling and no ones life is in danger. I think we can get back on the right path as a community and that Sun can improve (regain) its involvement with the community. The new Constitution and current OGB mentality simply doesn't move us toward that goal, but rather further from it. Please, therefore, consider an OGB consisting entirely of non-Sun individuals with no internal briefings or meetings or influence. In that potential situation, does the new Constitution empower or retard them in stewarding our community? Simple as that. People come and go, but law remains... it should empower all who fall under its jurisdiction, both today and tomorrow. benr.
