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  • From: "Jeremy Blosser (emrys)" <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>
  • To: SM Discuss <sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] project organization
  • Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 15:11:14 -0600

This issue is, IMO, way more important than the voting thread that took up
so much time recently. I'm bumping it back in the hopes we can get some
discussion.

If people *don't* care about this than it would seem to indicate people
*don't* care if we reach a 1.0 target any time soon, which would in turn
indicate that we are, in fact, focusing on the wrong goals at the TL level.

On Feb 08, Jeremy Blosser (emrys) [jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org] wrote:
> On Feb 08, Eric Sandall [eric AT sandall.us] wrote:
> > As there's been talk of removing the Project Lead position and just
> > having a Council of Elders (all of the Team Leads) you may start
> > another thread (separate from this one) to discuss that if we're
> > wanting to go along that route.
>
> I've been out of the swing of most things for a couple months and don't
> know about those conversations, but I have been talking a bit with people
> about the way the project is organized, so I guess now is as good a time as
> any to have a discussion the list. I've been working on catching up and
> was going to wait til I knew I had to raise this, so if I seem ignorant of
> things that have happened recently I'm sorry.
>
>
>
> Basically it seems to me that our current organization and plans don't mesh
> very well with the realities of people's schedules and interests. The
> results are pretty severe, as we currently are quite behind on basic things
> like security updates and are almost two months past the date we set for
> the 0.3 branch of stable and the 0.9.6 ISO.
>
> Note that I'm not trying to specifically blame anyone person or group for
> this; I have certainly been as absent as anyone lately. But it does seem
> that our existing efforts aren't producing the results we would like, so
> it's in our best interests to figure out what we can do better. Frankly
> I'm not sure what that is, but I have a couple of thoughts I can throw out
> anyway...
>
> It seems to me primarily that the current structure relies too much on
> individual Team Leads to be available and pushing their teams forward
> toward the established goals. We have almost more processes and teams than
> we do active developers, and while the relative role of each varies a lot,
> at any given time we probably only have a few leads who have time to be
> very active in the project. But the efforts of most teams depend on
> others, so that (for example) while the ISO team has been making good
> progress on 0.9.6, they can't really make a release until the QA and
> Grimoire teams get some other things done. Again, I'm not looking to start
> a blame game... it could just as easy go the other direction next time (and
> has in the past, I think). I'm just citing examples of where it breaks
> down.
>
> The simplest response to this would probably be to try to get a more tiered
> approach where some teams are under other teams, but I'm not sure that's
> best. We don't really need middle management, we just need redundancy.
> Maybe we could look at clustering leads of teams with similar functions so
> that if one lead is absent, someone else is obviously able to keep moving
> things forward. Maybe the "council of elders" idea Eric mentioned is
> something like this, I don't know.
>
> Of course, the above assumes we're taking the right approach even focusing
> on the things we are focusing on, like a 1.0 release. I'm not sure we are,
> given that we seem to need leads to move things forward this much. I think
> another fault of the current model is perhaps that we're asking the
> developers to focus a lot on policy and polish things that tend to ignore
> where they are actually interested and spending their time. This tends to
> lead to things like people referring to policies that aren't documented in
> the first place because our web sites are still recovering, or we just have
> more policies than time to document them. And while there are still plenty
> of p4 commits each day, we don't really get all that much closer to the
> goals we're behind on. Whatever the reason, given our numbers it might
> make sense to consciously pull back from focusing on a user-facing 1.0 and
> spend more time getting an environment developers can really work in,
> defined by looking at what people are actually working on or frustrated
> with when they do have the time. I imagine that's not a very popular
> thought, but at the least it seems apparent that the way we're operating
> now is not going to get anywhere near producing the 1.0 on our current
> roadmap within the next 6 months.

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