[ogb-discuss] Community Facilitators

[Jim Grisanzio]

Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Ben Rockwood wrote:
>> If it's any indication, I'm not aware of the OGB's activities right now,
>> nor am I attempting to follow.  The OGB is simply invisible from a
>> community perspective atm.  I've always advocated a strong and involved
>> OGB... I still do.
> 
> The OGB has been pretty dormant the past few months - I don't
> know if it's slow due to summer vacations, our individual work
> loads or from getting discouraged by everyone constantly telling
> us we're wrong, and having everything we try to do shot down.

I think the OGB has done pretty much what the founders intended. All in 
all, a very good job. And the weak central government bit expressed by 
Nicholas works for me as a model. Things will evolve, but the majority 
of the community didn't want a strong OGB running things initially. 
Actually, the majority of the community really had no comment on these 
issues until very recently.

I'm perfectly fine with the OGB being more assertive on meta community 
issues and representing the entire community to Sun and other 
organizations. That could be cool. But there are many forms of 
leadership, and I think we have a good opportunity to distribute our 
leadership among community members with this model. It will take time 
for that to develop, though, and that's absolutely normal. History 
proves this to be the case.

People complain that Sun is controlling things at a central point of 
power (the company), so why replace Sun with yet another central point 
of power (the board)? I don't think that's the answer. I think the 
answer is to automate some of these nits we argue about and have to do 
manually, distribute leadership as much as possible, and give it time to 
develop.

Jim
-- 
Jim Grisanzio http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris