On Sep 7, 2012, at 6:50 AM, Oliver-Rainer Wittmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to give my thoughts on defining roles for management, ... as the
> thread "Specific actions needed for developing the community" tends to become
> a general one on this topic.
>
> For me we, the AOO community, need to have an idea about the different roles
> which need to be fullfilled to drive our project:
> - role of developer
> - role of forum admin
> - role of tester
> - role of UX practitioners
> - role of release manager
> - role of community manager
internal / project(?)
> - role of marketing person
external / ecosystem(?)
> - role of press contact
> - role of distribution manager
> - role of buildbot admin
> - ...
role of translators (l10n)
role of infrastructure
>
> From my point of view these are more or less areas of the project which need
> to be fullfilled with certain actions and coordination.
> What I do not believe is that we need to assign certain individuals on these
> roles (*).
> I agree with Jürgen that certain individuals will grow their expertise in a
> certain role/area and as a contributor will take action or raise flag due to
> lack of resources, knowlegde, ...
> I think we already had quite a couple of good examples for such a habit. But,
> I also have to admit that for certain other roles we did not yet succeed as
> we could and should.
> And here comes the responsibility of the (P)PMC - its management duty, if you
> want. The (P)PMC as a group takes care that the roles are fullfilled. E.g.,
> by raising a corresponding gap on ooo-dev, by calling for discussion and
> volunteers, by leveraging new and/or established members.
> My thoughts are also based on the fact that Apache had only two roles in a
> project to by assigned to a certain individual - the PMC chair and the
> release manager.
>
> As pointed out above, I think that we need to work out the need and the
> working tasks for certain roles in our project. This work out is from my
> point of view a community task which could or may be should be driven by the
> current PPMC in order to demonstrate our self-governance.
This is good. I think that there are four parts in no particular order. We've
done a lot of definition already. This is about reorganizing and formalizing
the arrangement. Some of these teams of role players will be small and some
large.
(1) Defining the role so that any volunteer can know how to start helping.
(2) Defining who on the (P)PMC will have oversight with the charge of guiding
volunteers and identifying committers. This person should be a player-coach and
not a manager.
(3) Defining workflow around these roles. Different sets of roles will need to
work together.
(A) Developing a Release - developer, tester, ux, buildbot.
(B) Building / Passing a Release - buildbot, release, community.
(C) Distributing a Release - distribution, infrastructure, marketing,
press.
(D) Supporting Users - forum, tester, ux, community, marketing.
(4) What infrastructure the role uses.
I think that this should be documented in the incubator website at least for
overview and navigation about project roles. Each group that self-organizes
around a role should use whatever project resource makes sense for them.
Regards,
Dave
>
>
> Best regards, Oliver.
>
>
> (*) except the ones for the PMC chair and the release manager, of course, as
> they are part of the Apache Way.
