[ogb-discuss] OGB Meeting Minutes :: 11/7/07

[Glynn Foster]

OGB Call :: Wednesday 11th July, 2007

Present: Alan, Jim, Steve, Rich
Regrets: Glynn, Keith
Absent: Casper

Audio: http://dlc.sun.com/osol/ogb/audio-recordings/ogb-meeting-11-07-2007.mp3

1) Community Cleanup

   Steve sent out progress update, and contacted the various leaders for the
   effected communities and got back responses -

     o Chinese Users - Will fold into the Chinese Portals Project
     o CAB - Will merge into OGB community
     o GNU/Solaris - 2 of 3 community leaders thought it should be removed.
       Rich commented that it might be good to set up redirects to Nexenta.
       Alan commented that it would have to be an outside re-direct. Rich
       asked if we had a Ports/Distribution community, but Steve commented
       that it didn't yet exist. Alan commented that the original intention
       for GNU/Solaris was about adding GNU utilities. Steve said that a
       better redirect would be SFW or Companion.
     o HPC Developer Community - only have 2 threads, very little front page
       content, but the leaders asked for an extension, and started utilizing
       their community recently, so thinks its fair to let them continue.
     o Immigrants, Marketing and User Groups have merged into Advocacy
     o PowerPC - both a project and a community, and virtually all activity
       is in the project. 2 of 5 leaders and consented to it being consolidated,
       but 1 having a vocal discussion about it. Still not clear we have a
       consensus

   ACTION: Jim to talk to Dennis about PowerPC growing into a community.
   ACTION: Steve to complete the work necessary to clean up agreed upon
           projects/communities - all voted to agree with cleanup.
   ACTION: Steve to contact GNU/Solaris leaders to see which redirect
           would be better - SFW or Companion.

2) New Project Proposals

   Steve talked with Jim Grisanzio, who proposed the Bhimavaram User Group.
   Wasn't clear that project proposals needed an OGB response. In practice
   for all projects, it makes more sense for the project leader to send
   that announcement rather than the OGB. The OGB don't need to approve
   project proposals - Eric and Jim weren't sure whether it required a
   response from the OGB. Rich commented that OGB shouldn't need to be
   involved. Need to clarify this situation. As proposals come to ogb-discuss,
   they can get picked up by Eric and created. The email to ogb-discuss
   will act as an FYI only.

   ACTION: Keith to update project instantiation policy and point out
           due to Section 8 that consensus is required by the core contributors
           of the community group.

3) Project Guidelines

   Jim is concerned that we don't really have any sort of expectations about
   what constitutes open-ness and what constitutes projects within OpenSolaris -
   what the community groups ought to be doing. As an example, Crossbow has
   no leaders currently - fairly sure we wouldn't consider such a project
   proposal valid according to the current guidelines. Jim is concerned that
   some projects are just acting as 'hollow shells' in terms of content on
   opensolaris.org which isn't good for the long term growth potential.
   Steve asked if some of this could be covered in the community group
   guidelines, and be extended to projects.

   ACTION: Glynn to update community group guidelines and work on guidelines
           for projects as well.

4) Growing the Community

   Steve asked how we should grow the community - right now the OGB is primarily
   being concerned about organizing the current community, and maintaining and
   protecting the interests of the current community. Steve thought that one of
   the tasks we're chartered with is growing the community. Steve commented
   that it might be good to sync up with Sun about how to grow the community,
   and believes we need more contact with leadership in Sun. Rich agreed that
   it would be worth doing. Steve commented that we have 6 employees working
   with Sun, and has raised it with his management and hopes to get traction.

   Steve commented that no effort was being made for outreach and advocacy
   within the OGB. Part of this was due to the fact that community groups
   were being tasked with this, and OGB was only considered a governing body.
   Steve asked if the OGB should take a more active role to try and grow the
   community more. Rich commented that it was outside of the scope of the
   OGB, with Alan agreeing that the Advocacy community would be a better
   forum. Jim commented that the OGB wouldn't necessarily have the expertise
   to grow the community.

   Steve commented that other communities boards (Debian and GNOME) had a more
   leadership role with Rich commenting that those were grassroots efforts and
   maybe different to OpenSolaris. Without some clear leadership, some of the
   threads don't seem to have a clear resolution. Steve commented that there
   was a different opinion of what opensolaris.org - started out as a developer
   community, but now also moving towards a user community. Rich commented that
   those weren't mutually exclusive, with Steve suggesting that perhaps a
   specific user site could be created.

   ACTION: Rich to mail Ian and Jonathan to start a conversation externally
           about communication with Sun and the OGB.
   ACTION: Steve to continue to escalate up lack of communication with Sun
           within his management structure.