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  • From: Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] What I Have In Mind
  • Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:56:48 -0600

Disclaimer: These are some first thoughts and will probably be somewhat
stream-of-consciousness, but you may as well know where I am now. I
reserve the right to change my mind between now and Feb 1. Oh, also, this
is really long, but you didn't expect me to be brief, did you?

============================================================

Well, in my nomination speech I threatened I might be a bit of a hard nose
as a PL in the current project environment, and you voted for me anyway.
I'm going to take those vote results as indication that's what most of you
think is needed right now. So I'll risk actually following through on what
I said, but remember: you asked for it. If we don't like the results of
this approach either, feel free to either tell me so or just vote me back
out. I'm pretty pragmatic in how I go about things and I usually don't
take much of anything personally, so it's all good.

Anyway, as I noted in my speech, my main goal for the upcoming year is
going to be to sort through some of the chaos we currently have around us.
I don't mean that I won't be helping with spells and otherwise contributing
as any other developer, but that when I put on the PL hat it will be more
to make sure things get done than to do them all myself (I also just really
prefer to delegate vs. doing it all myself, not because I'm lazy (though of
course I am), but because I don't want all the power one place, I want it
spread around).

There are primarily three areas I intend to focus on in this regard. In
brief:

1) Get Things Done: Keep us on track on the things we agree need to be done
to move forward, and help us identify and put aside (but not forget
about) things we want to do but don't necessarily have time for right
now.

2) Policy: Make sure we are either following our policies or fixing them if
they aren't something we should follow. The point here is not to be
slaves to beauracracy but to give people a sense of stability and a form
to work in so they don't feel lost.

3) Diplomacy: It no doubt falls to the PL to act as the go-between for
people having issues with other Leads or between Components. Hopefully
not much of this will come up, but we do have some history. I'll try
not to repeat mistakes of the past, whatever they may have been.

============================================================

Less brief:

1) Get Things Done:
a) As I mentioned before, I will be setting up regular meetings pretty
far in advance, and we will meet on those dates. I don't really care
what percentage attend or if we decide a lot at the meetings, my goal
is just to have set times we regroup and make sure we're heading in a
vaguely similar direction. I want to avoid the situation where
someone says "we haven't had a group discussion in 6 months and I
have no idea what anyone else is doing".

I am tentatively planning to do these every 3 months for now, on the
3rd or 4th weekend of the month. Probably Feb/May/Aug/Nov. If they
start out well and we want more we can look at that, but this would
be the minimum. Look for more info later.

b) I will be pulling together a "PL's List of Projects" page on the wiki
that will list all the major and minor things people say they are
working on, with an attempt to track priority, contributors, and
status of each. I will use this list to try to help us focus groups
on a few projects at a time to get them done, then move on to others,
while not forgetting any of them. Right now we spread out between
them all so thinly people burn out all over and nothing gets
finished. Fair?

c) For those things that just aren't working I will probably get pretty
blunt about dropping them. The Drupal experiment still sounds good
in theory but if it doesn't step up soon I'm going to have a really
hard time leaving it on life support.

d) I'm going to be holding those that do commit to doing things
accountable, especially Leads. While it's a core tenet here that
people work on what they want to work on, and it's simple fact we
can't force anyone to get anything done, once someone commits to
doing something and others are depending on them I do think they
should get it done. If they don't, they should at least lose any
prestige they got by agreeing to do it in the first place. I'm the
first one I expect to be held to that standard, by the way. I know
I'm behind on things already and if I don't catch up I expect you to
do something about it.

To this end I'll be requiring the Component Leads to give me details
on who they want making decisions for them when they are away,
whether assistants or the full Lead group or just me. We *will* stop
being frozen by one person moving or losing connectivity or getting a
new job or being abducted by aliens or otherwise getting busy with
life.

For my part I will probably be appointing multiple APLs with
different focuses; like I said, I prefer to delegate things, and we
don't have enough people to afford a real hierarchy.

e) The stable release process is obviously a high "get things done"
priority right now, and I'll be watching the current attempts to
restart things pretty closely. I have my own ideas to add to the
process depending on how the current approach works, but I'll
probably give it 3 iterations or so before expecting I need to
interfere. That's assuming it gets through 3 iterations without
significantly stalling again, of course.

2) Policy:
a) I will make sure we follow the ones we have. We created a lot of
policies last year we thought would help us with issues we were
having. As Andrew has noted, if we still are dealing with those
issues it's important to note we haven't actually tried most of the
policies, and there's no reason to think changing them is going to
mean progress either until we try the ones we already have.

Fair warning to those of you who haven't gotten around to git yet: We
do have a policy that says devs who go 6 months without contributing
get slated for removal automatically, and I'll be enforcing that
starting in February. You probably want to either make sure you're
contributing or hope your fellow devs will vote to keep you
regardless.

b) We also know there are areas our policies have issues, and we need to
resolve those. Some of those were discussed in the ML but never
finished, others will come up as we go along.

One of those is the actual role of the PL, as I noted in a previous
message. I want to see discussion on this, but my own pitch will be
to keep it fairly broad so the PL of the time can try what they think
works. We mostly need to establish that the PL does have the
authority to act in the place of Component Leads who are away, though
I for one will be pushing to make clear that the PL only gets to do
that if a CL is actually gone; I want to keep an active CL the
authority over their own area apart from an actual vote overriding
them.

3) Diplomacy:
a) Well, I don't have a ton here beyond dealing with things that come
up, but there has been some frustration in the air lately over the
lack of things getting done. I expect holding people accountable to
help with this. It may not help those being held accountable but it
will hopefully help other people to feel less frustrated and more
willing to step up themselves to fill in where needed. In the end we
are going to have to work together on things to move forward. We do
a pretty good job of that when we're actually organized, so hopefully
I can mostly help us stay more organized, and not need the rest.

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  • [SM-Discuss] What I Have In Mind, Jeremy Blosser, 01/20/2007

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