On 04/17/09 11:00, Michelle Olson wrote: > On 04/16/09 14:34, Peter Tribble wrote: >>> >>> The immediate goal is to help current facilitators and their community >>> groups to better understand the OpenSolaris yearly election, voting >>> details >>> and specifics of grant updates by engaging with other experienced >>> OpenSolaris facilitators.
This would be very valuable. I found getting info out about the election very difficult (either in my role on the OGB or as Facilitator for Advocacy or even just as a long time member of this community. I have often thought about why this is so, and last year I came to the conclusion that, although well intentioned, the vast majority of people in the community simply aren't interested in governance issues. That doesn't have to be seen as a negative statement, but it does require a different perspective when designing governance mechanisms. In my view, the voting membership of the community should be relatively small and consist of people who are interested in looking out for the community's long term future -- just like the OGB itself. >>> A future goal would be to expand the group to include >>> representatives from >>> all community groups so that we fully satisfy the constitutional >>> requirement. The OGB can act on this requirement right now. The constitution states directly in 7.5 that the OGB appoints Facilitators to the CGs. So, in reality, the reporting discussion going on in the other thread was already considered and written into the current constitution. The problem is that the concept was never implemented by the previous boards. So, it seems to me that any interested board member could drive this or the OGB could create a committee to do it. Doing it as a project proposal is fine, too. >> That would be under the current constitution, which does have >> facilitators. >> The new draft version didn't, although I thought that each collective >> ought >> to have a named point of contact (which is really what the >> facilitator role is). >> > Right, a point of contact who manages the records, reports status to > OGB, and ensures that communication from OGB is properly disseminated > to participants. The Facilitator is the connection between OGB and all > the groups (community groups, project groups, user groups and any > other new group types that surface). > >> And also the new constitution didn't have the hierarchy of a (small) >> set of >> CGs above a (large) set of projects, but is much flatter. In that >> real world, >> every CG, project, and user group would be the same and all would have >> a facilitator - making quite a large population. In theory, yes, I agree. In practice, no, I don't think the population will be large at all. :) We have already seen that the characteristic of the community is to not be that interested in governance at any large scale. Also, the previous OGBs weren't interested in implementing this Facilitator feature of the constitution, so that is why I argued so strongly to cut it. There's no need to have processes on the books if we are not going to actively implement and refine them. A great deal can be learned about a process by simply trying to implement it. All you coders know that. And it's no different for us project management types. Also, regarding the flattening of the community articulated in the new constitution: as we took out the Facilitator role we expected that the new Leader role would fulfill whatever minimum interactions were needed between the OGB and the individual group. That's not well defined in the new constitution itself, but that could be beefed up in the project lifecycle process document, which has a provision in there for archiving Groups. That process document, which is intentionally outside the constitution so it can be updated more easily, is where the OGB could create a committee to manage the interactions that it needs to initiate with groups. > If we could be so successful to get, say, 200 facilitators, we could > break it into the group types. So, we'd have a CG facilitators list, a > project group facilitators list, and a user group facilitators > list--way in the future. As a long time project manager, I can appreciate this goal and I certainly honor the intention. However, I don't see this particular community scaling to this level of governance awareness. We don't really have enough voters to justify such a large group of Facilitators. Plus, regarding the UGs (currently 120), we've already seen that many (most, probably) are very independent. They want a tie to the main community and site, certainly, but not to the level of being actively involved in the details of governance and voting and policies, etc. There are some pretty big language and culture barriers to work through as well, especially given the complexities of our current governance documents. > This could also enable the groups to have a place to propose new > ballot measures needed by their group type, develop interfaces for the > polling mechanism, anything related to improving election processes > for their groups specifically, or for the greater community related to > the yearly vote. At some point in the future, when non-Sun > participants can make updates to the polling database, this would be > the group. > >> So what I would like to see is a clearer understanding of what the >> facilitators >> are really for, in a way that transcends the organizational minutiae >> embedded >> in the current constitution and isn't so explicitly tied to a >> specific structure. >> >> > The Facilitators will have a mail list they can use to ask questions > about the upcoming elections, details about how to vote, when to vote, > candidate lists, issues with the polling mechanism, details about > expiring grants and how to renew them, election calendar > dissemination, information about the annual meeting, ballot measures, > etc. And when one person asks a question, everyone learns the answer. > We answered tons of duplicate questions about renewals last year. I know pretty much everyone disagrees with me on this issue, but all of those issues above could have been handled by using the Core Contributors list. We have a list for the CCs to talk to each other, and voting is part of being a CC so I don't know why we never used that list for this purpose. We only used it at the very end, but by then it was too late. There is value in having the Facilitators briefed on all these processes, certainly, but in reality we have such a small voting population that the CC list seemed like an efficient venue to directly reach everyone who could possibly be involved in the election. If we rely on Facilitators to do this information delivery job exclusively, then they have to go to their lists, which may contain a great number of people who are not interested in governance. I'd much rather keep the voting population small and active and communicate with them directly about governance issues. Then, over time, if we grow to any great degree we can build processes to accommodate that growth. In general, I think we ought to make things work small first before thinking about how to build process for being big. Heck, we are /already/ small. Let's recognize that. We are only talking about, what, 400 or so people in this last election? > In any structure, we need a central group that is larger than the 7 of > us to conduct an effective election. At the beginning it needn't be so > large as to require inclusion of a rep. for every group, but ~50 > people would be an ideal number to help get the information out to all > the various corners of our community and ensure that everyone is able > to log in successfully, is aware of their voting status and the > polling window, and has access to someone they trust to help them with > any problems they encounter on their joy-ride through ssh keys, > proxies, leading and trailing spaces, etc. Again, I totally agree with the intention here. And thank you for bringing this up. We will have to deal with this in some way, and if we stick with the concept of Facilitators than a project to gather them would be helpful. But I think the OGB could create an election committee (or your project) with a hand full of people who have the time and the desire to run the election. Part of the problem in the last two elections has been the complexity of the election process itself. That, too, was simplified in the new constitution. Anyway, +1 to your proposal to get it going. I think it will be much smaller than you are expecting, but I'm happy to participate. It will help keep me involved to a degree since I do the project setups at the moment. Jim -- http://twitter.com/jimgris
