Re: Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting July 30 2002

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 11:21, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>   - org chart:
>     This was discussed at the Summit, we now have a number of commitees
>     like the GUADEC, Web team, Sysadmin, Release team, etc...
>     Each one shall have a leader who can be used as the communication
>     contact for the group, the goal is to be able to build better
>     communication between groups

So, in terms of 'communication between groups' we've already had a
fairly massive failure :) GNOME does not suddenly have 'committees', nor
does it have an org chart. I'd hate to think that anyone on this list
got the impression that a cabal was going around creating committees-
that's not the case and I hope never will be. 

What Jeff, Johnathan, and I came up with is a simple text file, which is
referred to as the orgchart but has basically no chart-like properties
:) 

What the file does do:
*lists various groups that already exist within GNOME
*lists what Jeff, Luis and Johnathan think these groups _general_
responsibilities have been or should be
*lists who the primary contact person/people for each group currently
is.

What the file does not do:
*attempt to dictate responsibilities to the teams
*attempt to micro-manage the teams in any way- these are /general/
issues/responsibilities as much as possible
*attempt to dictate who the leaders of the teams are
*have any claim to being complete

What I hope the final, edited, revised, approved version will do:
*be completely changeable at any point- none of this should ever be
	written in stone.
*answer for each team 'what do I do next'
*answer for other teams and individual hackers 'who do I ask for X'
*answer for other teams 'what is team X going to provide GNOME'


So... I've attached the 'chart'. I'd originally hoped we'd have some
chance to discuss it with the affected people and get their feedback
before bringing it out for more general feedback. That's clearly not to
be the case, so I have no idea where to go with it now- it clearly needs
feedback from the affected teams and especially team leaders, and
foundation-list is not the place to get that, but I'm reluctant to spam
g-h or d-d-l with this. Thoughts on the next step?

Luis

P.S. I hope it came through that I'm seriously annoyed that this was
portrayed as creating committees, and that no one actually /asked/ what
the heck this was before it was announced. Making an announcement based
on a chart you haven't even seen is... umm... well, I'll just leave it
at 'really dumb' and leave out the vulgarities that were in the first
draft.

GNOME Administration
====================

Foundation Board
 - Havoc Pennington
 - responsibilities: grab list from foundation.gnome.org

Foundation Membership Committee
 - Glynn Foster
 - "Maintains membership list for GNOME Foundation, organises annual Foundation elections."

Executive Director
Advisory Board
 - Tim Ney
 - responsibilities: grab from foundation.gnome.org

Marketing Working Group
 - Leslie Proctor
 - "Marketing branch of the advisory board."
 - work on bridge between community marketing group and board, others

Release Team
 - Jeff Waugh
 - "Define the requirements for GNOME software releases.
    Coordinate and communicate with GNOME maintainers and subprojects.
    Ship the software within defined quality and timeliness requirements."


GNOME Teams
=================

i18n
 - Kjartan Marass, Christian Rose
 	*Test i18n/l10n implementation (including RTL)
	*provide complete l10n coverage for gnome release

Accessibility
 - Bill Haneman
	*test a11y implementation (including development of test plan and recording of test results)
	*evangelize and educate developers (including release team)
	*plan for freeze process testing/fixing- work with release team to develop plan for 2.2
	*coordinate with usability team

Documentation
 - John Fleck
	*write and publish documents
	*work with and/or recruit hackers to create infrastructure to provide and create documents
	*publish and organize documents written by others (such as API docs)
	*review all GNOME software for glossary compliance
	*maintain style guide and glossary

Usability
 - Seth Nickell, Nils Pedersen, Calum Benson
	*maintain and publish the HIG
	*review all GNOME software for HIG compliance and general usability
	*provide and evangelize advice and resources for hackers and programs
	*coordinate with a11y team

Web
 - Steve Fox
	*Maintain and develop web site (content and infrastructure)
	*facilitate other projects in their web presence
	*communicate with marketing groups
	*manage news feed 

Quality Assurance
 - Luis Villa
	*triage
	*help hackers learn bug-management
	*organize QA partners for projects
	*define QA process and metrics
	*work on test plan, including automated test tool development/usage

System Administration
 - Owen Taylor
	*maintain GNOME's technical infrastructure
	*plan for future of net/web services
	*work on decentralization/mirroring of GNOME data

Module Maintainers
 - Various Hackers [possibly release team, possibly board?]
FIXME- not so much tasks for maintainers as for someone herding maintainers [probably release team]
	*needs to be a full module list of actively maintained modules, with status, maintainer, etc.
	*needs to be aliases to reach maintainers
ENDFIXME

Note that as originally discussed, two other groups that do not exist (community marketing and envangelism/recruitment) were proposed. Since they don't really exist yet, I've not included them in this document.