Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

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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