Re: Who Decides?

I have another post to this list opening up a conversation about community 
participation in design.

Also, OSAF developers are about to start more active posting in the dev 
list.  Stay tuned.  What people are up to should become clear via both bios 
on the web site and the posts themselves.  Participation is an active part 
of a staff developers job.  How this works is going to be fluid and dynamic.

At 09:01 PM 11/3/2002, you wrote:
>Mitch posted another installment on his weblog, in which he said:
>
>http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/000033.html
>
>"[H]ow to keep moving along with the product definition while still
>benefiting maximally from community involvement? On the one hand, the
>more high-quality input and debate about the product the better. To
>paraphrase Bill Joy, most smart people don't work in your own
>organization. On the other hand, decisions must be made, and voting,
>even if it is non-binding, isn't the way to go. Some successful open
>source projects have solved this by having a Benevolent Dictator for
>Life (Linus Torvalds for the Linux kernel, Guido Rossum for Python), who
>is respected, sets general directions, and makes final calls. I'm
>honored that I've been proposed for this on the design mailing list, and
>I accept. So now my head is really on the chopping block. Respect has to
>be maintained and earned through action. I hope I'm up to it."
>
>Ok, now that the siren-call of democratic development has been put
>behind us, and Mitch has accepted the role of BDFL (Aside: maybe we
>should come up with a new title? How about 'Grand Poobah of the Loyal
>Order of Water Buffalos' (GPLOWB)?), we can discuss what the OSAF needs
>to do to help the community help them.
>
>A big problem (as noted by Warner Onstine
>http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/process/2002-November/000006.html) 
>for many open-source projects sponsored by corporations is a sense that 
>the corporation is a black box, the inner workings of which are impossible 
>to divine.
>
>Now, as a non-profit corporation, the OSAF could certainly 'open the
>books' and publish everything, from board meeting minutes to finacials,
>but that's not what I'm talking about here.
>
>I'm talking about the org-chart.
>
>A number of people are listed on the OSAF website, along with titles and
>job descriptions, but there is little sense as to who reports to whom,
>or what parts of the platform and application are being worked on by
>which people.
>
>Now, obviously the community is (and wil likely remain) very
>unstructured and fluid. But we're a 'smart swarm', that will apply
>itself to the points where it can do the most good.
>
>Right now, the folks from the OSAF who have interacted with the
>community on these mailing lists are (I think) the most senior people
>there (Mitch, John, and Andy). While this is great, we're going to need
>to talk to the folks who are (and will be) writing Chandler's code. Are
>they not allowed to come out to play? Something I've noticed in a few
>other corporation-sponsored projects is that interacting with the
>community was something the developers were supposed to do on their own
>time, not during work hours.
>
>There are a dozen decisions made every day by someone writing code. I am
>not suggesting that every decision needs to be run by the community for
>feedback, as that would slow development to a crawl, but besides a
>record of the decisions made (in CVS), we also need to get to know the
>people making the decisions. And not just the big decisions, but the
>little decisions too.
>
>So, who decides?
>
>Cheers,
>
>Michael Bernstein.
>
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