Garrett D'Amore wrote: > I'm not sure if this is expected or not... as I'm not a member of the > Advocacy group. You are more than welcome to get involved. We are always looking to grow. We welcome people of all languages and cultures and people with all levels of technical and non-technical skills.
> But the number of Core Contributors in that group is > double that of its nearest competitor (ON, 48 CCs) and *quadruple* that > of its next nearest (Tools, 22 CCs. > And I'd like to make it much bigger, but we don't have any resources so we are just growing organically. There are well over 4K people on 60 or so Advocacy-sponsored lists, and we will grow much larger over time. Think tens of thousands in dozens of countries -- especially when the various OpenSolaris binary distros mature. Currently, the majority of people are coming from User Groups around the world, so that number will grow substantially and many of us are actively working to make that happen. I realize that many people in this OpenSolaris community on these lists on this website think that this is the only OpenSolaris community. It's not. OpenSolaris is actually a global community of communities now, and there is significant OpenSolaris activity occurring off this main website and in ways not directly connected to this website or its governance. There are many reasons for that, of course, but my main goal is to connect as many of the OpenSolaris communities as possible. And it's working. More and more of these communities are creating relationships with the main site in the form of projects, UGs, and list participation. It's very cool. > As a member of the larger group I do worry what this will mean when it > comes time for the election. It certainly seems that something akin to > gerrymandering may be occurring, or at least have the *appearance* of > occurring. > That's an amazing statement. It's meaningless without substantiation, though. Do you have any? > While the constitution certainly doesn't require it, I wonder if anyone > else besides me would find it useful if a couple of the Advocacy CCs can > explain why that group should need so many CCs? No. We will do that when the Constitution is changed to require that from all CGs, and that will require a community-wide vote. Under no circumstances will we do otherwise. We run our own affairs under the Constitution, and we are a CG in good standing under the Constitution. We trust that other CGs are doing the same, and we stay out of their business. > Are the CC's in that > group *really* core contributors, or are they just people who > occasionally pipe up on mailing lists? Please define "real" and point to the approved definition of "real" and why you feel you can make that assessment for another CG. > I've lived under the belief that > core contributors should be people who are very actively helping the > community achieve its goals. We are. And we have demonstrated that. Clearly. > In most other communities this would > probably be achieved by actual code contributions. In the Advocacy > group, I'd guess this would be work like writing PR content, managing > web forums, or maybe running User Groups. > You "guess"? That sounds pejorative. I hope you didn't mean it that way. What is "writing PR content, managing web forums, or maybe running User Groups" mean anyway? Actually, Advocacy sponsors the BeleniX list, which is directly about coding (within the context of a distro that is largely run by a thriving user group that has other very technical contributors). It also sponsors the trademarks list, which is about marketing/branding and that is a specialized activity. It also sponsors the main news page on opensolaris.org, the only CG to maintain one of the main site pages. It also sponsors a new mentoring project, which is about getting new people involved in coding. It also sponsors 56 user group projects, which involve users, sys admins, students, professors, and engineers of all types in a dozen or more countries. Advocacy CG members have been busy presenting at conferences and other events around the world for quite some time now, and those people have generated quite a lot of content -- the vast majority of which is technical. Advocacy CG members have also been meeting with press and analysts around the world to deliver technical and community content. The Japanese OpenSolaris Community runs installfests led by engineers. The Bangalore Community maintains BeleniX and puts on bug-fixing sessions led by engineers via the request-sponsor program. The German Community ran the first and only OpenSolaris developer conference (Berlin first, Prague next) and the papers presented were all technical except for one (mine). The China Community runs coding contests and engages students at universities to the tune of well over 100,000 people at this point. Other communities are contributing technical translations in collaboration with the portals and the Internationalization CG. And it goes on and on. I can't even keep track anymore. Do you consider any of these items to be second-class contributions? > Perhaps we should consider a constitutional amendment to limit the > number of CC's that a community can nominate (set at some number high > enough to reward those groups with greater participation, but not so > high that any one or two groups can dominate an election? 10?) Is this designed to keep Advocacy down? If so, please try that. It will do wonders to help me motivate the Advocacy electorate. Why are you suggesting that we punish people who are simply doing good work under the rules we all voted for? Why are you suggesting that we disenfranchise the *largest* segment of the meta OpenSolaris community? > Or > perhaps we should just abandon the distinction between CC's and ordinary > Contributors, and open the vote to the great unwashed masses? I'm not > sure... but I am wondering if the bar set to become a CC in some groups > (e.g. Networking or ON) is set substantially higher than in others? > I'm all for making voting easier and eliminating the distinction between "Core" and "Contributor". It's confusing. And it is keeping the voting population of Advocacy artificially low. The bar is not higher for Networking or ON. It's just different. We have to allow for the notion that OpenSolaris is more than ON. Actually, it doesn't matter if we allow for it or not. It has already happened. Also, we have to realize that over time, ON will be a small percentage of the entire OpenSolaris community, but that doesn't mean ON loses any influence of ON's activities. Advocacy will never attempt to run ON. We only want to run our own CG so we can help OpenSolaris grow. We trust that ON can run itself. We expect it, actually. > The other wrinkle in all this is that some communities have considerable > overlap in their CC membership. E.g. many of the ON CC's are probably > also CC's in other groups. It would be an interesting data point to > measure "voting loyalty" for each CG, where each CC gets one vote, which > is divided equally amongst all the CGs in which they participate. CCs > that belong only to one CG contribute 1 to that CG. CCs that belong to > two contribute 0.5 to each of those two CGs, and so forth. > > The resulting graph may yield some surprising data about how fairly (or > otherwise) weighted the election is likely to be. > > Of course, I'm operating here under the premise that we actually *want* > all of the CGs to have a roughly equal say in important group-wide > matters... that may itself be an entirely false premise. > They should not be "roughly" equal. Just equal. Jim -- http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris
