[ogb-discuss] OGB 2007/003: Communities with < 3 Core Contributors

[Alan Coopersmith]

Following on the discussion from this week's call and previous
mail about what to do with the Community Groups without Core
Contributors.

The Constitution gives us a couple of choices:

7.12. Termination. A Community Group is terminated by act of the OGB
      or by reduction of its named Core Contributors to a number less
      than three (3). Upon termination, the OGB may re-initiate the
      Community Group with a new set of Core Contributors or reassign
      the resources that were assigned to the Community Group, such as
      mailing lists, forums, and website information, to the at-large
      community or to some other Community Group of the OGB's choosing.

[So while my use of "defunct" to describe them may have annoyed some,
  the constitutionally correct use of "Terminated Community" would
  probably have been even worse. 8-) ]

By my counts during the election (and assuming none have named more
contributors since), these are the groups that don't have enough
core contributors:

Appliances	 	0	
Approachability	 	1
Chinese Users		0
Databases		0
Device Drivers		0
GNU Solaris		0
Games			0
HPC Developer		0
Immigrants		2
Observability		0
Printing		0
Volume Manager		0
Storage			0
Systems Administrators	0
Unix File Systems (UFS)	0

Steve's proposal for re-organization already covers some of these:

- 'Chinese Users' renamed to the 'China Portal' project and
     endorsed by 'Internationalization & Localization'
- 'GNU Solaris' made into a project endorsed by Freeware
- Performance & Observability communities merge under
     a unified 'Performance & Observability' community
- 'Solaris Volume Manager' renamed to 'Volume Manager' and
     made a project endorsed by Storage
- UFS, ZFS, & NFS made into projects endorsed by Filesystems

Ben has suggested merging Immigrants into the new Advocacy community
formed from the User Groups & Marketing merger.

Since those communities are officially dead, voting on their disposition
is left to the OGB once we have finished the discussion on them (not to
say we'll ignore input from the participants in those areas).

That leaves these communities which those proposals would have continue
but which don't have the required number of contributors:

- Appliances
- Approachability
- Databases
- Device Drivers
- Games
- HPC
- Printing
- Storage
- System Administrators

These communities don't seem to overlap with any of our other existing
communities, so I propose we give them a chance to reform themselves.

Each community mailing list would be sent a message asking the community
to nominate 3 or more initial Core Contributors, and a Facilitator (who
may be one of the Core Contributors) to notify the OGB of future grants.

The communities will be given 30 days to present a list of nominations to
the OGB - for any that do not do so, a message will be posted to
opensolaris-announce giving the community at large another 30 days to
present a proposal for reforming the community.   If no acceptable proposals
are reached in that time, the OGB will decide how to dispose of the community.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering