OpenSolaris Governing Board 2009: Q1 Rollup
An update on the OGB after our first quarter as a team. Here we are, from the left: Jim Walker, Michelle Olson, John Beck, Peter Tribble, John Plocher, Simon Phipps, and Valerie Fenwick (kneeling).
Outreach Status
We've made a great deal of progress on outreach in the last two months. The OGB met with Sun's executive liaison, Vincent Murphy, over lunch at CommunityOne West and we had lively discussion about the future, why IPS, and modernization. OpenSolaris technical lead, David Comay also joined us to answer questions and to get to know the board. That evening, we held a Townhall that Vincent also attended along with a relatively small group of interested community members.
Four members of the OGB also attended an all-day event for OpenSolaris User Group Leaders where we met people in our community from around the world, most of them long-term core contributors and enthusiasts. We learned a great deal, answered their questions related to why OGB, why IPS, and leadership. We all went to dinner together and made new connections across the globe that have resulted in new folks joining our regular OGB meetings to make their voices heard. Finally, many of us went to OSCON this week to work the OpenSolaris booth, lead BoFs, and give presentations.
Planning Status
We completed the groundwork for election planning with a team of 30 facilitators on facilitation-discuss. This effort is bearing fruit already through light-weight education about contributor grants, voting, and the basics of community group facilitation for OpenSolaris. The project provides a team for communicating election information and schedules out to the wider community for the first time.
OGB members also provided planning input for the OpenSolaris Developer Summit by completing the recent survey about possible dates for the annual 3-day event. OGB Vice-Chair, Peter Tribble also continues to lead the community, project, and user group reporting effort he started in Q1 with plans for Q2 reports and beyond.
Implementation Status
On the implementation front, John Plocher is drafting a constitutional executive summary and preamble to clarify the benefits of the new constitution draft and to provide a vision of our community purpose. We've also drafted a new version of information about How to Start a Project on OpenSolaris to make it easier to understand. Valerie Fenwick continues to lead implementation of the voter responsibilities policy toward increasing overall participation in the annual election.
Recognition Status
We recognized all existing community group facilitators and granted them OGB community contributor status this month. We also thanked them, the outgoing OGB, and those who supported the 2009 election in our Townhall slide presentation. Peter created a poster at CommunityOne, that was also displayed at the User Group Leader Bootcamp, to promote all those communities, project, and user groups who reported status to OGB in Q1. We've also made some progress on all OGB suggestion box requests we've received. So, I think we've made some progress on recognition, but have a long way to go on this item to really call it a success.
Change Management
We're starting to ramp up some new work to support the community through upcoming changes we see on the horizon.
We're learning and testing the new collective roles that implement the constitution and governance in the new opensolaris.org authentication application that is due to launch in August. We're also assessing the new user group and project roles that inform the future constitution so we can account for them in our updates to governance documents.
We've talked about the new focus for deliveries of OpenSolaris with new build tools and processes related to our conversations about IPS. And we've started to study the new content management system and improved collaboration tools that are planned for launch on opensolaris.org this fall.
There is a lot of positive change coming and some of it will be disruptive at first and require everyone to pitch in, so we're interested in how to help support the community through the change and how we can have a positive impact on areas that will concern our developer community.
Overall, a very productive and exciting first quarter!
