Jim Grisanzio: Sr. Program Manager, OpenSolaris Engineering

auth.opensolaris.org will be down for a couple of hours early Monday morning so the guys can update the systems. The changes will include making the roles in Community Groups the same as User Groups, and also providing access to the CG Electorates for the OGB Secretary to manage governance grants. We still have to get the new information pages out there -- Community/Project sponsorship relationships as well as the Contributor and Core Contributor lists -- but that work is largely done and should be released shortly. Once those bits are done, we`ll update the poll application for elections. And then I can`t think of any more governance-oriented work we`ll have to do on the website.

I also updated a bunch of pages on the site over the last week. I consolidated 45 newsletter pages into 5. I just archived them into years, basically. There is no real need to have each month be an individual page with a corresponding link gumming up the left nav bar. The amount of content is simply too small to justify all the sprawl. I also rewrote the Website Guidelines entirely and updated the road maps, Website Community Group front page, announcements page, and the Collective Life Cycle Guidelines. Links here along with new pages Bonnie is working. I moved a pile of pages around and put in redirects as well. This is all in an effort to prepare content (delete, merge, fix, move) for the migration to XWiki. I`ll be deleting a bunch of dead pages this week, too. It is amazing how quickly information grows old and how fast you can get fat with pages just repeating information from other pages. Over the weekend, I also renamed all the OpenSolaris User Groups on opensolaris.org, so their titles are shorter and will make the left navigation bar much cleaner on XWiki on hub.opensolaris.org. That change will come over on Monday with the content migration process.

See update announcement from Alan on Auth. 10/5/09

Bill and Bonnie sent some update emails (here, here) on Friday to website-discuss about the migration. We continue to migrate content three days a week from the tonic database on opensolaris.org/os/ to XWiki on hub.opensolaris.org, and things are starting to shape up nicely. Chris has fixed a pile of bugs (see Bill`s mail for the list), and Bonnie has updated the content migration document so people can better understand how to fix pages at the source if the content does not migrate cleanly. Chris will continue fixing bugs each week, and we`ll document those fixes in the content migration emails Bill sends. A few of us are also working on cleaning the common pages on the site -- that`s the content not owned by Community Groups, Projects, and User Groups. There are well over 100 pages in that category. We are deleting, updating, fixing, merging, and documenting. We got fat with common pages over the last few years, so I am trying to delete as much as possible. XWiki community here. Why we chose XWiki here. I`ll update Phase 2 of the website transition schedule tomorrow night.

In one of my own areas, I have been continuing to poke through the Advocacy pages and have been making pretty good progress. There are still a lot of broken pages that have no owners, so I`ll have to delete that stuff at some point. When we move to XWiki we`ll be giving more than 100 people edit privileges to the Advocacy pages, so I want to make some room for those guys to post new content. Today I updated the front page and some of the OSUG background and process pages and cut the content substantially. Hopefully, it`s getting easier to just get a quick idea of what`s going on, where to go for help, and how to do the basics. Most stuff happens on list via conversation anyway, and most activity at this point is based around OpenSolaris User Group so things are quite distributed.

I also cut the text around governance. Very few people are interested in governance, and it`s really not necessary for how we run Advocacy and build community globally at the grass roots. I have pitched governance issues hard in Advocacy and in my presentations for years now, but I don`t think we have made any progress at all. So, if people are interested in governance, that`s great. We encourage them to read the OpenSolaris Constitution and interact with the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) on ogb-discuss (subscribe, forum). There are plenty of opportunities to write, reform, and implement processes there. I no longer have the time or inclination myself, nor do we have the space or interest level in Advocacy to dedicate to issues that are not working. Also, I now think that governance on the one hand and direct community building & project management on the other really ought to be separate. It`s just a cleaner way to think about both. And, actually, many others have suggested the same thing along the way. I`m slow. Anyway, for me, there are simply too many other really interesting development projects to manage and user communities to build around the world.

Making progress.

I updated the announcements section on the Website Community today. I've been collecting these links for a while now since the website development and implementation projects are complex and they are being built and deployed over a long period of time. It's easy to lose track of what's going on if you are not directly involved, so we have been posting things in the Website Community for convenience for some time now. So, since we are only a few weeks away from Phase 1 of the transition, I figured I'd update the list. We are at 31 announcements at the moment. I may have missed a few here and there, but I think I got the major ones. I'm still fixing links and such, so I'll continue to update.

I drafted a new document to answer questions about collective life cycle issues on opensolaris.org -- Website Infrastructure: Collective Life Cycle Instructions. The document lives in the Website Community Group and attempts to explain the infrastructure implementation procedures I go through on project-setup for Community Groups, Projects, and User Groups. It also points to all the other documents that are involved in various stages. We can`t unify all those documents at the moment, so I thought that a doc outlining basic procedures and putting the other docs in context would be helpful and would simplify some things. I think I got everything in there for this first cut, but I am sure it will all evolve over time. Glynn Foster drafted an excellent group life cycle document as part of the proposed constitution in March, but that entire effort wasn`t successful so I`ll work it this way and see where we go. At the very least, it helps clarify the implementation part of the process.

1. The plan to implement the governance and website roles and collectives, and
2. The data migration strategy outlining how data will be migrated from existing databases into the new Auth database.

Reminder: Vincent Murphy will be hosting an OpenSolaris Town Hall meeting on Friday April 24th at 8 in the morning California time. Dial in and participate. Should be an interesting call. Watch this page for slides and conference call details.

The 2009 OpenSolaris Governing Board elections are well underway now, so check it out if you are interested. I have been nominated for another term -- and I appreciate that nomination deeply -- but I have decided to not run in this election. It`s time to move on from the governance project. I could use the extra hour of sleep, too. And believe it or not, that`s more than critical to me. It`s a must, actually, not just a nice to have. Also, I`m implementing specific plans for my future on OpenSolaris, so I make this decision with a great deal of clarity. You have to give up something if you want to grow into something else. I am determined to do that.

I`ve done a lot of governance on the OpenSolaris project, and I have learned a great deal in the process. Some of the experiences have been quite good and very successful, but I have to be honest and say that far too many were disappointing. I have think about how I can learn form the experience and integrate it all into my project management bag of tricks. To review, I was directly involved in the formation of the Community Advisory Board during the OpenSolaris Pilot Program four years ago, which included running the election, searching for a member from the open source community, contributing to various policy discussions with executives and community members, offering program management services to both sides, etc. I then provided program management support for two years to the CAB as it transformed into the OGB throughout the Charter and Constitution development process. I helped draft numerous documents and have been communicating extensively about the OGB for more than for years in a variety of venues internally and externally. I`ve even given entire speeches on governance, if you can believe it. I found those talks challenging because governance is boring (except for the flame wars we had along the way), and I`m certainly no expert in all this. Anyway, I ran for the OGB during the first public election and lost by one position, which was probably a blessing but I was pissed nonetheless. I then ran for the OGB last year and won and subsequently did a great deal of work. But I also sacrificed significantly due to time zone issues conflicting with my regular job. I say "regular job" because serving on the OGB, which is certainly related to my job, is a very different experience from reporting up line to the OpenSolaris engineering organization at Sun, and it is also a very different experience from the community building projects I run.

I believe I could better serve Sun and the OpenSolaris project by working on engineering projects that build core infrastructure for community development and/or support the generation of product revenue. That is clearly the direction I am moving. I will have to be involved in governance after this term to a certain degree because part of my job now involves creating groups on the site, and I already manage the process of creating all the OSUG projects on the site. And since the proposed project life cycle process will be centralized with the OGB under the new Constitution, I'll work on the Sun side to manage the actual creation of infrastructure in collaboration with whatever committee the OGB sets up to approve the applications. Additionally, my role is evolving now and I'm the program manager for the website transition team, so my priorities need to be focused on that work especially during the next 6 months. A lot of this stuff is related to a certain degree, but for me the lines will be much more clearly understood after this term ends in a few weeks.

And, again, I get an extra hour or sleep. Which is nice after you are up till five in the morning the day before.

I'm pinging a bunch of lists tonight (announce, advocacy) to alert the community to starting thinking about updating their Core Contributor lists. We'll have an election in March of 2009 when we'll elect a new OGB and ratify a new constitution, so if people want to vote they should make sure their Core Contributor grants are valid. It's sort of like registering to vote in the American system, I suppose, but with a very important difference: you actually have to earn your OpenSolaris grant and that's not at all true of the American system. Anyway, there have been no new Core Contributors grants in a long time, so that's why I'm doing a little publicity around town. I even pinged core-contrib-discuss, which is a list for Core Contributors that we never use. That's a shame. It's a wasted opportunity for OpenSolaris Core Contributors to communicate.

Community members can determine their voting status by searching for their names at http://poll.opensolaris.org/ under the "Grants" tab. Only Core Contributors can vote.

I'm especially interested in updating the Advocacy Core Contributor list since I spend so much of my time there. Advocacy is the largest group of people in the OpenSolaris Community since it's home to 94 OpenSolaris User Groups around the world. We are spread out over many lists, so it's even more important that we start acknowledging and granting Core Contributor status to people who are doing a great job.

The current OpenSolaris Constitution is here as background on all this. We'll use that governance system to run the next election, but hopefully part of that election will be the approval of the new community organization, which is in draft form here.

I updated the Constitution again. This is the third attempt. I'm sure there will be many more drafts. You don't write something like this in just a few drafts. Also, I put this version on the Genunix wiki, so hopefully that will make it easy for people to just jump in and edit. The basic structure is all there at this point. Basically, we have one short Constitution outlining the structure of the community and that document points to three process documents: project creation, membership, and group management. The last one, group management, I just created a placeholder for today. We'll have to write that from scratch or bring over and edit some of the process bits from the current Constitution on voting, etc. Here is the whole thread on ogb-discuss. My OGB blogs here.

We are starting to rewrite the OpenSolaris Constitution, and we`re looking for community input. I posted a really rough initial draft today by combining some of the OGB reorganization documents with some of the bits from the current Constitution. It`s hard to blend these documents, so I found myself deleting entire sections of current Constitution. I doubt we`ll be able to edit these docs together, so I`m advocating a total rewrite in a new voice (and a single voice). A new version of the Constitution will be approved at the March 2009 election. I keep track of everything I do on the OGB here at this tag: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/tags/ogb.

• website-discuss
• ogb-discuss
• opensolaris-announce

• Current status of the OGB reorg here.
• Website restructuring overview here.
• xWiki evaluation here.

I'm trying to move the OGB's community simplification process forward. There are important infrastructure engineering projects that depend on some very basic decisions from the OGB. So I've been advocating breaking this process into many small decisions, rather than one large and complex one. We need to vote on Monday. We are out of time. Make a decision. Move to the next one.

I've expressed my frustration about all this in a few forums, but that's mostly my desire to just move faster. It's my default position on everything, actually. But I think we may now be getting closer to agreeing on a draft from which we can start. Here is the latest draft of the community simplification proposal. I say start because there is absolutely no way to simplify and reorganize the OpenSolaris community before the main ON gate has been moved outside and before the opensolaris.org webapp infrastructure has been implemented. First, the movement of the gate outside brings with it a significant amount of infrastructure and process we've never had outside, and long with that comes a whole boat load of people as well. And second, the current webapp is not flexible enough to enable any reorganization. Instead, all three things need to occur -- and are occurring -- at the same time. There are some clear dependencies that need considering. By necessity, the two infrastructure implementations are happening in a phased way, so any community governance reorganization needs to follow that same model.

Also, the work on the new webapp has been based on the existing Constitution, but it fixes many of the obvious and well-known issues that have been discussed for years in the OpenSolaris community. This is very cool. We will have a remarkable amount of flexibility with the new site that we've never had before, so it only makes sense simplify governance by actually simplifying governance, so we don't inadvertently add too much layers and process before we need it. That's why I'm pushing to keep things as flat as possible and as simple as possible. We can always get more complex over time if we need to. It was a mistake to create governance before we needed it, so we shouldn't make the same mistake now by recreating governance before we need it in a genuine attempt to simplify what we already have. We should cut first. Then build back up. If we need to. Regardless, I will always argue for a flat, simple, approach.

Although we still have some bits to figure out regarding all of this, at least there is clear consensus for making the OpenSolaris User Groups their own collective group on the site. This is very good news. This means that the OSUGs will have top level exposure right along side Projects and Communities and any other meta groups we specify under the reorganization. Many of us have been wanting this for a long time. The new opensolaris.org infrastructure coming along will easily allow it, and now we hope to adjust the governance to enable it as well.

• Group replaces Community Group to describe all collectives.
  
• Groups are Communities, Projects, and User Groups.
• Core Contributor is removed.
• Facilitator is removed.
• Emeritus Contributor is removed.

• Participant: Someone who participates in the activities of the Community.
• Contributor: A Participant who has been acknowledged by the Community as having substantively contributed towards accomplishing the goals of that Community.
• Leader: A Contributor elected by a Community to lead the Community.

• Participant: Someone who participates in the activities of a Project.
• Committer: A Participant who has been acknowledged by the Project as having substantively contributed towards accomplishing the goals of that Project and who has commit rights to any code repositories owned by the Project.
• Leader: A Committer elected by a Project to lead a Project.

• Participant: Someone who participates in the activities of a User Group.
• Coordinator: A participant who leads and coordinates the activities of a User Group.

• Groups can associate with each other for purposes of collaboration, but development Projects are no longer sponsored by Community Groups. As a result, the new Group creation process can be simplified because governance is decoupled from operations and there is no need for CC voting for Projects. If people want infrastructure so they can do some work, they can send mail to a Group creation alias with a request and if it's not rejected in a week it's automatically created.

• If Groups want their participants to be involved in community-wide voting then each Group will have to follow the OGB Membership Committee's specification (which is yet to be defined).