[advocacy-discuss] [website-discuss] Thoughts on an opensolaris.com

[Glynn Foster]

Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> Generally, I support any way to provide a better platform for 
> OpenSolaris user groups to grow and diversify. That's really my main 
> focus in Advocacy, after all, so if the UGs get a better deal out of it 
> that's cool. I think the recent migration of UGs to projects on .org has 
> worked out very well as an interim solution since we never had any plan 
> to support UGs on .org initially (they were always part of the 
> "Community/Project" structure even though they don't necessarily fit 
> either). We should try to offer more support to UGs (resources, wiki 
> site functionality, higher profile, etc) -- which, I assume, .com will 
> provide.

I agree though, as Laurent pointed out in a later post, most user groups have 
enough knowledge to be able to create a page themselves. Ideally whatever web 
infrastructure we create, we'll be able to handle both cases.

> But UGs are not exclusively users. They are a mix of users and 
> developers, and they number about 5K people at this point. Also, 
> although many UGs may want to move, I can see some wanting to stay. In 
> that case, we'd have UGs living in two different locations (.com and 
> .org) with presumably two different offerings. That's not the end of the 
> world, of course, but it can be confusing. Another issue to consider is 
> governance. If the UGs move to .com, how would we enable those people 
> who have earned their Membership in OpenSolaris via Advocacy (since 
> Advocacy sponsors the UGs) to keep their voice in governance?

Governance is a hard issue. It's not clear (to me) how user groups currently 
govern themselves, or clear of their involvement in the advocacy community. 
Fortunately, that's probably a result of the fact that you've just continued 
doing work rather than worry about the Constitution. I think *most* of the issue 
may only revolve around who gets to vote for the OGB. I have thoughts about 
that, and how the governance model could reshape if an opensolaris.com comes 
along, but that'll involve another separate writeup I think! :)


Glynn