Shawn Walker wrote:
> Time and time again it has been said that the OGB can only act as an
> "arbiter" of sorts; it is my belief that they must be empowered to
> actually *guide* the community.
I strongly agree on this point. When I first went up for election, I thought the
board was going to be much more of a leadership role, and was rather
disappointed that the consensus was the act very much within the bounds of the
constitution to be a governance board rather than try to be anything else. In
one way, it makes sense, because it's encouraged me to participate in activities
outside the OGB. In the other, despite best encouragement, the wider community
hasn't chosen to take it as an opportunity. But I didn't believe strongly enough
that the OGB could be this body, and it's my own fault for not pressing it
further.
As I've mentioned earlier, my involvement in GNOME has be *much* different on
the Foundation Board. Our primary goal is to make sure the project has the
resources it needs to be successful, and continues to be aware of topical issues
that come up each year. Essentially that includes co-ordinating with our
advisory board members, doing some fundraising, managing accounts, and making
sure GNOME is both approachable and relevant as the environment changes. We very
much include the time to link in different external communities to the project,
and cheer lead from the sidelines.
But obviously this is not GNOME - and you can't apply what works in one
community to another (which is my personal primary beef with the constitution
and its creation before the community had time to grow).
As for Indiana/OpenSolaris. When I got the opportunity to work for the team, I
jumped at it (well, after a little bit of convincing from Sara) not because it
was an opportunity to build my own personal experience, though it was a welcome
addition. It was because I saw a *massive* opportunity for the OpenSolaris
community, and I still do [1]. Ian has talked about the 'binary platform' being
more interesting, and I agree with him. We've seen the numbers of people
registering their interest - huge user growth. The success of the starterkit has
been a good measure of that growth. And now we're continuing to see it with
Indiana. If the numbers of Marc's blog [2] are even *half* of the people who
downloaded and run it, chances are, that OpenSolaris has been seen by at least
one new user.
FWIW, I'd very much support the idea of forming a steering committee (with
selected members from the community and Sun) around the trademark guidelines. I
think there's a great opportunity there to really come up with an incredible set
of guidelines for use of the trademark *that we can't currently use* as a
community. I don't think anyone, not even the mythical Sun, wants to alienate
existing distributions who help grow the ecosystem.
Glynn
[1] Many, many, many people (for whatever reason) are expecting to be able to
download and run OpenSolaris - you can see their requests on the mailing
lists, on IRC, and in blogs. There is a *significant* demand to meet that
expectation.
[2] http://blogs.sun.com/marchamilton/entry/busy_weekend
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