Re: [OSCOM] Reminder: Public email for OSCOM board

On 15 Sep 2006, at 19:22, Chalu Kim wrote:

> You need to first volunteer to be a member and then step forward.  Are
> you on the list first assembled?
>
> Paul, do you have the list?

Pardon my interruption, but I assume this might be one of the issues  
with OSCOM in its current state: I've been lurking on this list for a  
while now, and suspect it is tough for newcomers to walk in without  
assumptions or knowledge of the past. Hence they don't necessarily  
feel welcome at all - old boys networks and such.

We (*) have been building an open source CMS for three years now,  
shipping one for two years, with 6 non-trivial releases so far. We've  
build a small but thriving business around it. We also build a small  
but thriving community around it, and contributions are starting to  
appear. Also, more than 50% of our core product development has been  
funded directly by customers: they pay us for doing open source  
development.

My hunch would thus be that OSCOM should be of major interest for us.  
Yet, I don't know.

(*) We, that's a tiny Belgian four-person company, which has got were  
it currently is without much involvement with industry or open source  
consortia, standardisation efforts, without external capital nor much  
press attention. Yet, we have two non-trivial publicly traded US  
customers, and quite a few large local ones.

In terms of "real" open source community development, we build,  
donated and supported stuff to the Apache Cocoon community that is  
now in use by all of the Cocoon users, including our competitors in  
the OSS space. Out of the four of us, two are Apache Foundation  
members, and three are Apache committers. So it's not that we don't  
"get open source".

It's that we don't "get" what OSCOM could do for us. CMPros, yes, I  
can figure that one out.

So what are our options? Help to make the new OSCOM into something  
that is useful to our and the community's purposes? If so, how do we  
get in? Will we feel welcome? Will OSCOM-NG again be Zurich- and  
Boston-centric? Who gets to decide the overall strategy: members or a  
board?

Regards,

</Steven>
-- 
Steven Noels                            http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought                              Open Source Java & XML
stevenn at outerthought.org                stevenn at apache.org