hey ... below is an outline of some of the issues I think we'll face in
the next six months as we implement the new community organization we
are working on. It's not complete by a long shot, but it's a start and I
intentionally kept it small to initiate the conversation on list. I also
recommend a specific course of action at the end.
*
Reorganization & Simplification: Current Status*
*
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-September/006066.html
*
Status Changes to Current Groups*
* As the infrastructure team works on the new opensolaris.org
website, they need to know what existing groups will be changing
status when the new community organization and website are
implemented. For instance, I already know of 72 Projects that will
migrate to become User Groups, so I'll work that part and
communicate with them and get that info to the infrastructure
team. But are there any other Communities that will become
Projects? Or Projects that will become Communities? The team will
need to know this so we can make the necessary changes in the
application to accommodate those migrations. I don't have a hard
deadline for this right now, but we should have this decision by
the end of November if possible. If there are changes to that
rough time period, I'll let you know.
*2009 Election Education*
* The OGB's simplification/reorg is basically re-writing major
sections of the Constitution that cover roles/groups, project
creation, and membership. These changes have clear dependencies
that will affect our intent to start implementing now:
o The community has to vote on these changes, and
o The infrastructure is not in place to support the bulk of
the changes.
* I realize the OGB voted to temporarily ignore the current
Constitution in order to fix it, but we still have to be mindful
of the scale of changes we are proposing. We shouldn't go too far
without making sure we have enough community participation, and we
ought to test our assumptions as well. We need to make sure we
have this consensus because the infrastructure team is doing
website work based on our decisions. I actually don't think we are
that far away since we've been discussing this in the open for
many months now. I just think it's the OGB's responsibility to do
an education campaign as we prepare well for the next election
since that will involve voting on a new Constitution as well as a
new board.
*Infrastructure*
* The new site will be rolled out in stages and in parallel to the
current site for testing, updating, and, of course, migrations.
Nothing surprising here. We've already had parts of the
authentication application out for a couple of rounds of testing,
and we'll continue more of these releases this fall and into the
new year. The issues around these tests and other existing
infrastructure issues will determine when we can have the final
live site with the new community structure and wiki. There will be
a series of migrations (content, data, users, etc), and some of
that will be done by the team and some will be done by the
community. We are looking into building some tools to facilitate
the content migrations, but it's difficult to determine how long
the content migrations will take even with tools. Migrating the
UGs to projects manually took 3 months, and the scale we are
talking about for the entire site is obviously very much larger.
* We will look at automating the membership process that Simon/Alan
were talking about on list after the election and after the core
infrastructure pieces are in place.
* We can not make major changes to the poll application until after
the majority of the site is implemented, so we'll have to use the
current poll application to run the next election. That means that
all the current roles and associated groups will remain in place
until after the next election. Once the new OGB is in place and
the community has approved the new Constitution and the new site
is functioning properly, we can rebuild the poll application to
account for the new organization and the 2010 election. Using the
existing poll application for the 2009 election will not affect
the election, per say, but it will enable us to focus on finishing
core infrastructure projects first and it will enable the
community to approve the changes in the Constitution.
*
Recommendation*
We should not try to implement all parts of the simplification/reorg
before the 2009 election and before the website can support everything.
We are only talking about 6 months till the end of our term with a major
holiday in the middle, so breaking it up into a few steps seems wise. We
have time to finish this if we plan properly and work consistently.
Trying to do it all now will only cause confusion and distraction. But
we can easily start with these two items:
1. Project Creation Process: The current process is manual and
involves members of the infrastructure team. As we implement the
new manual process, we'll have to communicate with the entire
community and with the infrastructure team, we'll have to update
website documents and instructions to support the change, and
we'll have to form any OGB committee (if needed) as well. In the
process of doing all this, we'll have ample opportunity to
characterize this change as one part of the entire reorg. That
community-wide education and communication is necessary. And by
starting out changing one part first, it will help us to figure
out our own process as we implement other parts in the future. We
need a test case, in other words.
* So, we need one person to lead this change. Volunteers?
2. Rewrite the Constitution: I doubt we'll be able to simply
cut/paste the changes we've made into the current Constitution and
have it make sense. I think we are looking at a re-write. But
that's fine since we have time and we need that time to do this
work. Also, this should not take any longer than a few months
since we have more focus and agreement now on the board, and the
community wants a simpler structure. The new Constitution should
be shorter and simpler as a result. But we do have some writing
and communication to do to make sure that when voting time comes
we have not forgotten something important. If something is broken,
we need to fix it now. Not in March of 2000.
* So, we need one person to lead the re-writing effort. If
there are no objections, I'd like to volunteer to lead this
part.
How about starting there? We can add more if we have the opportunity to
do so, but for now this seems like a reasonable place to start. If we
wanted to start with the new membership process as well, we could add
that to the mix, but we'd have to do so under the old roles -- in other
words, a Core Contributor = a Member. Then the roles are consolidated
under the new system later. I'm fine with doing this, but I feel
strongly that we ought to bite off one thing at a time so we don't cause
to much confusion and get bogged down. I'd rather have slow and
consistent movement rather than risk stagnation by attempting to do too
much too soon. I think implementing the new project creation process and
rewriting the Constitution can be done in parallel, but another
implementation should wait until we are confident the first one went well.
That's my pitch.
Jim
--
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/
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