[opensolaris-summit] [ogb-discuss] My comments (very subjective) on proposed Summit topics

[Garrett D'Amore]

Stephen Lau wrote:
> Darren Reed wrote:
>   
>> John Plocher wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Peter Tribble wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> So how do we encourage communities and individuals to take up the
>>>> reins of governance?
>>>>         
>>> Not to be flippant, but why would they want to?
>>>
>>> That is, what problems are they currently having that could
>>> be solved by their spending energy on self-governance?
>>>
>>> My perspective is that the answer is that there are lots of
>>> serious problems, none of which can effectively be solved thru
>>> self-governance alone.
>>>
>>> Problem 1:  The structure of the meta-community echoes the
>>> confusion in people's minds of what exactly OpenSolaris is
>>> and should be.  Because people are not in agreement with
>>> what it is, there is no consensus on how it should be
>>> structured.
>>>
>>> Problem 2: The observable artifacts of the community are
>>> still locked away from direct community manipulation:  The
>>> source tree, the bug database, the web site, the mailing
>>> list infrastructure, the ON C-Team and even the ARCs are
>>> /ALL/ solely maintainable by a set of under-resourced,
>>> under-appreciated and constantly dwindling group of Sun
>>> employees.
>>>
>>> Solve these problems and the community of developers will
>>> grow.  Ignore them, and it will stagnate and die.
>>>       
>> So a question that needs to be asked is, considering where
>> we want to go, is it easier to just build something "new" and
>> let Sun work out how it wants to join up with that, rather than
>> to try and morph what we have into something else?
>>
>> ie. Instead of trying to get part of bugster out of Sun, create
>> a new bug reporting database for OpenSolaris, independant
>> of Sun's internal database, and so on.
>>     
>
> We've got an existing DTS evaluation going on - it's floundering not 
> because Sun is holding anything back, but because nobody is making the 
> effort to evaluate any of the DTS (or at least they haven't mentioned it 
> publicly).
>   

There is another real problem here.  I think the only people who are 
qualified to "fully" evaluate the bug database are those who are also 
Sun employees.  Why?  Because only they really know what the current 
bugster contains, and what features are needed, and what aren't.

Of course, all the Sun employees I know are up to their neck in other 
work.  And it isn't entirely clear that the Sun folks who should be 
paying for an evaluation of a new DTS have any motivation to do so; 
after all, bugster works just fine for *their* purposes.

Speaking for myself, I don't have the time to do a full evaluation of a 
DTS.  And, I'm not really qualified as a DTS administrator.   *HOWEVER*, 
I know that I would be willing to play in a sandbox that someone else 
built.  And even use it to track real project bugs.  I *suspect* that 
the same is true of other people.

So, if someone is energetic enough (a big if, I know) to set up the demo 
sandbox, then maybe an announcement in a broader context inviting others 
to participate in the test (as developers, not DTS administrators!) 
would be helpful.

    -- Garrett