OGB Call :: Wednesday 11th April, 2007
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/ogb/audio-recordings/ogb-meeting-11042007.mp3
Present: Alan, Casper, Glynn, Keith, Rich, Steve
Regrets: Jim
1) Roles and responsibilities
The board agreed to select the following roles -
Rich Teer, Chair
Alan Coopersmith, Vice-Chair
Glynn Foster, Secretary
Rich noted that he will be on vacation in the UK for the next 3 weeks and
unlikely to be able to take a call.
2) Project creation guidelines
Keith proposed the board should tackle the project creation process. Steve
like the fact that there was a relatively low barrier to creation, but didn't
like the fact that oppositions to the projects aren't taken into account, nor
the fact that endorsements are coming from people who don't necessarily have
the time to work on it themselves. Alan noted that the current weak
connection between projects and communities caused a lot of problems during
the creation of the initial core and non-core contribution lists for the
election.
Keith mentioned that it would be good to move project proposal and
endorsement to community groups, enforcing a tighter connection, and allowing
the project team to be aware of all the necessary background information they
need to take into account. After a one or two week timeline, if the community
endorses the project, it gets approved. Rich wondered if there was going to
be some confusion where the project would come under the umbrella of multiple
communities. Keith remarked that any well integrated project would likely
tie in the interest of multiple communities, and that we shouldn't
necessarily get too worried about what that means. Steve suggested that if
asserting endorsement would mean ownership, then maybe it would make sense.
Rich noted that we needed some sense of ownership, so that project
contributors wouldn't fall through the cracks. Glynn wondered if that wasn't
a consequence of having community leaders choose their contributors, rather
than contributors pro-actively applying for membership. Glynn explained
the GNOME Foundation membership policies. Keith suggested it was similar
to FreeBSD's model of sponsorship, but all would fail unless there is a
strong governance model in place.
Keith wondered if there would be a situation where a project was endorsed,
successfully integrated, but the project team didn't make contributions to
the endorsing community. Keith mentioned that the person proposing the
project has to decide which community is most useful, and can certainly
bring in or exclude others as the proposal is discussed.
Keith commented that using opensolaris-discuss currently wasn't useful, with
Alan commenting that most people knowlegable about a given project wouldn't
necessarily be on that list. Glynn suggested that it would be good to have
some central forum where all new projects are created, after discussion
within the various community groups. Steve commented on needing to encourage
more people to subscribe to opensolaris-announce, as important announcements
weren't being picked up. Steve wondered whether we could make it a mandatory
subscription, and cut down on posts like build deliveries. Keith commented
that mandatory subscription to a list posting more than important
announcement swasn't necessarily in the interest of everyone but agreed
opensolaris-announce should only contain important announcements. Rich
suggested project-announce for sole creation of new projects, with Keith
commenting that it should ideally be automatically run by some backend
infrastructure. Until that is achieved, it should be moderated.
ACTION: Keith to write up a proposal for new project creation guidelines and
post to ogb-discuss
3) Cleaning up dormant Communities/Projects
Steve would like to do a first pass at cleaning up existing dormant
communities and projects, and figuring out which ones should ideally be
projects rather than communities. All agreed that it wasn't a good discussion
to have on the call at this time until such a proposal was written.
ACTION: Steve to write up a proposal for cleaning up existing communities
and projects.
Keith asked if Steve was going to look at consolidations. Steve hadn't
planned to address it, but could certainly put some thought into it. Alan
commented that there was a lot of confusion eg. X Windows could easily be
a project of the desktop community, but it's also a separate consolidation.
Steve mentioned at a first pass, ON and X are consolidations that are
communities, and JDS and storage are consolidations that are projects.
Steve asked if projects 'completed' once integrated, which wouldn't be
appropriate for a consolidation as a project eg. Zones. Glynn commented
that JDS only moved from being a community to a project because of the
technical limitations of wanting access to SCM.
Keith suggested that a consolidation was a long term maintained gate, and
certainly not only Sun specific. Keith mentioned that we could take the
approach of reorganzing the consolidations. Consolidations have to be at
some level governed by a community group, and need some accountability.
Keith also commented that it would be good to get C-Teams out into the
open. C-Teams are groups of people managing the consolidation. More
specifically, an instance of a consolidation that is associated with a
particular release. Glynn commented that it would be good to describe the
current process at Sun before we try and figure out a model that works
for opensolaris.org. Keith mentioned there was a lot of good documentation
in the current draft development process.
ACTION: All to continue discussion of interaction of consolidations
and releases on ogb-discuss
Alan commented that a representative from the C-Team is part of the
P-Team (product team) that decide the release schedule. Casper commented
that the release model didn't make sense on opensolaris.org because it
was a source base. Glynn commented that there was a need to provide a
mechanism for distributions to make arbitrary decisions on what bits to
choose, with Keith mentioning that ARC guidance was useful here. Alan
commented for the need to have milestones, otherwise EOF'ing particular
components was hard. Keith suggested this was a discussion for another
time.
4) Press interaction
Glynn commented that it would have been nice to be in the loop for the
storage press release this week. Keith commented that it would have been
good to have engineering review, and suggested talking to Sara Dornsife and
Terri Molini as to why there wasn't broader participation.
ACTION: Glynn to follow up with Sara and Terri about press interaction with
Sun
Rich mentioned that the previous CAB/OGB had a gentlemen's agreement about
Sun confidentiality, and it worked well. Alan commented that this was
similar to the current press embargo guidelines that Sun has. Keith suggested
the issue should be divided; ensuring any PR relating to opensolaris.org has
the right people in touch with the right information; and making sure we are
aware of things in advance for any potential PR. Keith commented that press
releases were absolutely worthwhile, and we should tell the world about
something we're doing or have done. Those types of PRs wouldn't need to be
embargoed usually.
Glynn wondered if assigning roles and responsibilities to board members
would be a good idea eg. being a point contact for questions relating to
legal, financial, press etc. Rich suggested another approach could be taken
so that discussion would take place, and then a representative assigned to
reply on behalf of the board. Glynn worried that we needed a defined timeline
because press deadlines were often tight.
5) Core contributor list
Alan asked whether the board should give a vote of agreement to the core
contributor list, according to section 4.2 of the constitution. Keith
commented that the criteria used to select the membership was defective,
and hence the list being defective. All agreed to table this discussion
for a future date.
ACTION: All to discuss on ogb-discuss the core contributor list, and how
it relates to section 4.2 of the constitution.
