On 05/04/09 06:00, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > Stephen Lau wrote: > >> My only Core Contributor grant is from the OGB at-large community... >> I'm not sure who the facilitator is, >> > > I don't remember ever naming one,
All of the boards passed over the role, although there were threads on it from time to time. There was always confusion about where the Facilitators would come from. In reality, according to the constitution, the OGB should have appointed the Facilitators, but that didn't happen so Facilitators came along naturally based on need from some of the CGs themselves. That's fine, too, but that wasn't a comprehensive solution initially and that led to communication problems between the OGB and the CGs -- most recently with the low voter turn out this election and the failure to get enough votes to pass the new constitution. And since interest in the community was generally low for this we cut the role from the drafts of the new constitution. We figured the new Leader role would serve that purpose (in an effort to simplify the named roles). No matter. It's all just history now. > which was a failure to lead by example > (or an indication of how little attention we paid to that constitutional > role) - it seems like a natural extension of the OGB secretary duties to > also serve as the facilitator of the at-large community, Michelle is listed as Facilitator for OGB: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/facilitation/table/ Actually, that table lits 29 Facilitators out there now, so we can use this as a model to get more and increase communications across the community. > as long as the > primary role of the facilitator is keeping track of the core contributors. > That's part of it. Facilitators are basically project managers or community organizers or community managers (pick your term, they are all the pretty much the same). OpenSolaris does not have a single community manager or any single leader, for that matter, so it seems to me that those management-oriented functions are best distributed among the Facilitators because the leadership structure of this community is distributed as well. Facilitators can do more or less based on interest, of course, and they can be engineers or non-engineers, but there is a minimum level of communication required and that's specified in the constitution. It's all very basic stuff. Personally, I hate the term "facilitator" almost as much as I hate the term "evangelist" so perhaps as we go along on this path we could consider renaming the role to something more substantive. And it's not only a personal preference. The word is simply weak and that's part of the problem. People weren't interested in it and didn't see it of value, whereas in reality it has always been an extremely needed role in this community. Jim
