[General] Upcoming community discussions

[Ted Leung]

Hi all,

I wanted to get a few discussions started on the topic of community.

In December the operations group had an offsite to discuss a number  
of topics, one of which was community.   The real heart of that  
discussion was the question, "should we be investing more time and  
resources into growing our community".   For quite some time, we have  
intentionally been focusing on getting Chandler to dogfood in some  
area, and our community development efforts have taken a back seat.    
The most important thing that got discussed and decided at the  
offsite was that it is time for us to actively spend time and  
resources to grow our community.       I posted a summary of the  
various discussion topics last year <http://lists.osafoundation.org/ 
pipermail/dev/2005-December/004693.html>, but due to finishing up 0.6  
and proximity to the holidays, I bet that people haven't had much  
time to look at or respond that message (if you have comments or  
questions, please do respond).

There is now a bunch of work to be done on all kinds of projects  
related to community.  We came up with some ideas at the offsite, but  
I am sure that there are plenty more that we didn't discuss or think  
of.    If you have thoughts (or concerns, or questions) about what we  
ought to be doing related to community building, please speak up and  
reply to this message.     There are two discussions that we will be  
having very shortly:

1. Governance
We've had a number of issues on the lists that have ended up as "this  
is really about governance", and promised that we would have a  
discussion about that.   At the offsite, Mitch talked about the  
notion of principle-based governance (as opposed to governance via  
lots of rules).    He is working on a write up explaining a bit more  
about this and how this applies to OSAF.    Once Mitch finishes that  
write up, we'll have a public discussion about the  governance of  
projects at OSAF.

2. Chandler 0.7 Community goals
As part of the planning process for Chandler 0.7, I want to set some  
goals in the community area.    Since this is mostly a Chandler  
topic, I will start a separate thread in dev at osafoundation.org for  
that discussion.

You'll notice that I sent this message to  
general at osafoundation.org.   We don't really have a place to discuss  
community issues, and many of the issues cut across all the  
projects.  So rather than cross posting to all the lists, let's  
experiment with using general@ for this (and other "general") purposes.

Ted