OpenSolaris Governing Board 2009: Q2 Rollup
Following is a late summary of OGB status at the half-way point in our term. This summary will form the basis for my talk at OSDevCon next week, which will hopefully be more of a discussion.
Outreach Status
We made more progress on outreach during our second quarter as a board, but the focus of our efforts was on outreach to groups within Sun on behalf of the OpenSolaris Community.
This quarter we invited Lynn Rohrer to join an OGB meeting and talk with us about the statistics her group generates for the OpenSolaris project that cut across communities, projects, and user groups. The data provided a picture of the activities that are tracked to measure health of the project and a view of the most active and least active areas in OpenSolaris as measured by mail and web page traffic. Lynn's presentation validated many of our assumptions about areas that need revitalization. The data also informed our work to assess all community groups, check contributor and core contributor records for community groups, and outreach to any groups with fewer than three core contributors in an effort to cleanup communities that are inactive and reinvigorate communities that wish to continue. Thanks to Peter Tribble for driving this effort and managing all communications.
The Developer Collaboration team responsible for the opensolaris.org web site infrastructure also joined an OGB meeting this quarter to discuss the roles and privileges implemented in the new opensolaris.org user authentication application. We agreed to minor changes to the role names in order to separate governance roles from web site roles which the Developer Collaboration team implemented last month. We also requested changes to the new application to enable the OGB Secretary to continue to manage grants on behalf of the entire community. We'd like to formally thank the Developer Collaboration team for making these late changes to the database and all the work required to re-migrate data so that we can continue on a path that separates governance roles from the web site roles and to support the current responsibilities of the OGB Secretary. Thanks also to Jim Walker for driving this review of the new authentication application.
Planning Status
We drafted and iterated on the 2010 election calendar this quarter and developed a schedule for our work on the draft Constitution. These two plans will take us through the final six months of our OGB term.
Implementation Status
We've implemented comments on the draft Constitution that were received just before the election last year and sorted out the disconnect between the Charter and Constitution to our satisfaction. We have added a Preamble to the draft that reinforces our commitment to open source and continue work on an executive summary that outlines the benefits of the new document. We are currently on schedule to meet our goal for stabilizing the draft and starting to communicate widely about the benefits of the document next week. Many thanks to John Plocher for driving this work, managing the details and making updates to the draft.
We are currently under moratorium for creation of new projects and communities on the web site until the Developer Collaboration team completes implementation and migration of the new XWiki infrastructure for opensolaris.org. But, we still intend to complete the work on the How to Start a Project on OpenSolaris document to replace project_instantiation.txt and publish the document after the transition to XWiki is complete.
We also continue to work on completing the Active Facilitators table and replace community group facilitators as people change roles. We'll begin regular communication to facilitation-discuss in November to provide key dates for election voting preparations.
Recognition Status
Sponsorship of the Facilitation project has helped to increase awareness around maintenance of contributor and core contributor records for community groups along with the outreach work to revitalize and cleanup community groups. So, we've seen a number of communities updating their contributor grants throughout this quarter and we hope to see that trend continue through the end of the calendar year, to prevent the rush of updated grants we saw just before last year's election. Thanks to Deirdre Straughan and the associated community group facilitators for their work to update grants for the OGB, Storage, Documentation, HA-Clusters, Device Drivers, Crossbow, LDoms, Sysadmin, Advocacy, HPC, and Printing community groups in the first half of the 2009 OGB term. This work puts us in a great position to get the remaining community group core contributor rolls updated by the end of the calendar year, so we can use our time in January to promote the nomination of new OGB members and the coming March election.
Overall, a productive quarter that sets us on a clear path for the second half of our term!
