Garrett D'Amore wrote: > The numbers speak for themselves.
Numbers don't speak. They are interpreted and spun. > What is the point of having so many > CC's, if not to overwhelm the polls? You are assuming political motive where there is none. The point is to be involved. To have your voice heard. To participate. No one in Advocacy is thinking about "overwhelming" anyone at the polls. > I'm not saying that this was the > intention, but it certainly (to me at least) can have that *appearance*. Using language like that may be good rhetoric, but it's harmful to the people in Advocacy who are just doing their jobs and want to be involved. Currently, they are a bit at the edge of the main community. That's changing now, though. > Part of the reason I'm concerned is that I've had a belief that we were > basically running as a meritocracy. I'd be a bit unhappy if the core > technical leadership of OpenSolaris (both in and out of Sun) ultimately > got steamrolled in any kind of election because the Advocacy CG has > several times the number of CCs as the CGs where the actual "work" of > developing (and not just coding, but also tools, i18n, and docs) the > product occurs. Has this happened before? No. In fact the *opposite* is true. Although Advocacy had more Core Contributors than any CG last election, it did *not* vote in any substantial numbers at all! Your speculation on this issue is baseless. Also, I can just as easily say this: I'm concerned that the ON engineers running OpenSolaris will steamroll the users since more engineers votes. In fact, it would be interesting to see what CG offered the most votes in the last election. I doubt it was Advocacy. > I'm not demanding anything, only *asking*, in the hopes that an > explanation would allay my concerns. Cite your evidence to support your concerns. > The defensive posture that you > seem to be taking suggests to me that maybe my concerns are justified. > Are they? Cite your evidence to support your concerns. > Well you won't tell me, and that's fine ... but in the > absence of a response I'm left to make my own conclusions. Your conclusion is baseless without any evidence. > (Whether > those conclusions mean anything in the broader scope is an entirely > different matter. Right now, with the membership the way it is, it > would be very hard for any group to push the project in a direction that > the Advocacy group didn't like.... ) All evidence thus far on the OpenSolaris project suggests the exact opposite. The Advocacy CG is largely made up of User Groups, and most of them are not that active and only loosely connected to opensolaris.org. Also, the OpenSolaris Membership itself is not that active in terms of governance. Most CGs are not actively led, and the Members have clearly decide to not lead the community. That's their choice, of course, but it goes a long way to supporting the notion that the OpenSolaris community has a leadership problem. I don't entirely believe that, but I'm leaning in that direction lately. > Btw, I posted originally with the view that maybe, just maybe, there > really is a good reason for there to be so many CCs in that group. I > was hoping for a clarification, and frankly wasn't expecting the > defensive posture. > >>> 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. > > It isn't clear to me that all 48 core contributors have contributed so > heavily to warrant a CC grant. I'm not sure how that's your business. > It isn't clear to me, quite frankly, as > an external viewer, that there is that much work that the Advocacy group > has done. Did you read my last mail where I listed some of work we are doing? > But then again, I admit fully I don't have a full view into > how the Advocacy CG identifies CCs. I *hope* that CC grants require > some active form of contributorship and not just participation. (Just > because I participate in e-mail discussions on the crypto lists, for > example, doesn't mean I should be a core-contributor for that CG.) I wouldn't know. I'm not involved in that CG. How could I possibly comment with any credibility whatsoever? >>> 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? > > I don't know... I'm not a marketing person. Marketing is only part of Advocacy. A small part, actually. > But to me advocacy suggests > the sort of things that that marketing folks might do. And I'm not > trying to suggest that those things aren't important. But I don't think > they are so much vastly more important that the group should have 2-4x > the clout of the other large groups in OpenSolaris. The group has more Core Contributors because it has more members. It's that simple. We are drawing form a larger pool of people. > I'm also not certain that setting up a blog or some other kind of > posting forum really should grant "core contributor". Why are you so pejorative toward Advocacy? > However, some > folks certainly have done a lot of work (Ben Rockwood comes to mind, for > example. As Dennis Clarke, etc.) to help spread adoption and > evangelize OpenSolaris, and they deserve to be recognized. Are there 48 > such individuals? I'm not sure. Well, it's ok not to be sure. You are not involved, so naturally you can't be sure. > Put another way, if I set up a small "Temcula OpenSolaris User's Group", > would I deserve a core contributor grant from the Advocacy Group? I > hope not. Now if I helped coordinate several large user groups, did a > bunch of associated mail list moderation, etc, then yeah, I can see it > would make more sense. I'm just hoping that there is sanity in the > Advocacy Group. (I'm not saying that there isn't such sanity...) Sanity? You say you're not saying it yet you said it. First we were out there gerrymandering to fix the election and now we are insane. Ok. >> 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). > > The BeleniX distro should have its own CG, IMO. > >> 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. > > Users, sysadmins, and students are not "core contributors". Wrong. The Constitution says otherwise. > Someone > running/coordinating a mentoring project for those people might deserve > a CC grant though. (I guess its kind of a gray area for whether or not > actual mentors would get one.) > >> 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? > > No. But I don't consider the *sum total* of them to be more important > than the other work that takes place elsewhere. Of course it's not. Who said it was? > Not everyone who > writes code for ON is an ON CC. Likewise, I don't think everyone who > participates in the Advocacy group should have a CC grant. There are more than 4,000 people in Advocacy. Obviously, not all are Core Contributors. > Out of curiosity, does anyone use Contributor (not Core) grants? It > seems like there is an opportunity to use them here. Yes. > Also, some of those activities belong in other groups, IMO. For > example, there are already communities for Internationalization, > Approachability, etc. Many people participate in multiple CGs. That's a good thing. That will continue and grow, actually. >>> 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? > > I'm not suggesting that we punish them. I'm suggesting that Advocacy is > itself not 3-4 times more important than any other activity involving > OpenSolaris. Why do you keep saying that? > Advocacy by itself doesn't write documentation, perform > translations, or develop new features. Advocacy people have been involved in all those activities in one way or another. > Your "threat" really does help me make my point. Not a threat. A promise. > Put another way. If Advocacy simply decides to boycott the elections, > then it maybe mathematically impossible to get a quorum. I don't think > any group should have that kind of power. To the contrary, Advocacy has very little power and that's very easily documented. It didn't vote in large numbers last time around and it shows little interest thus far this time around as well. I'll have to work harder. >>> 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. > > But in the context of *OpenSolaris* (not ON nor Advocacy), the Advocacy > group inherits though its CC grants such an overwhelming vote that the > leadership in other equally important communities can trivially be made > politically irrelevant. That isn't the kind of meritocracy in which I > want to participate. > >>> 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. > > If the community groups are equal to one another, then no one community > group should have an unfair advantage in the voting. A group with > several times the number of voters of its nearest community has the > ability to totally overwhelm/disenfranchise any of the other communities > it owns. Perhaps we should limit all CGs to, say, 100 people. Then each can choose CG's from the same pool. Then everyone will be the same. > In US history, there are several problems and different views that have > led to things like the electoral college, the bicameral legislation, > etc. Maybe what we need here is some kind of bicameral legislative > body. I dunno. Right now I don't like the idea that Advocacy group > could pretty much take over the entire organization even if all the > other CCs banded together to fight it. You have Advocacy taking over the entire community and you still can't cite any evidence to suggest that Advocacy has any power whatsoever. In fact, I've given evidence to the contrary. When it votes, it will have power, but it can not express that power over other CGs and certainly not over core engineering issues. > (Due to the overlap that exists > in other CGs, I think you may find that the number of contributors who > are Advocacy CCs outnumber the sum total of all other CCs. For > example, I think most of the ON CCs are also CCs in other communities. > I myself am a member have 3 CC grants.) Cool. I have every confidence that you have earned those grants. I would only ask for the same respect in return for those in the Advocacy CG. Jim -- http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris
