Topic: SME Community - Poll - should we have a formal structure?

[girkers]

Buddha, if it is the case as you stated with slord, why can't we ourselves do what he has done.

I too don't possess the technical abilities, but could we assist slords, for version 7.0.  I am certainly ready to put in the leg work and from the other thread on volunteers I don't think we will be short of people wishing to help out.

pcowley, whilst your are correct in what you are saying about commitees and the like, I don't believe that we need to go to that extent.  Yes somethings can get boged  down in processes and needless to and froing.

[Buddha_Joe]

girkers,

 I was thinking the same thing.. I think matsk compiled a list of people who volunteered under a thread that RequestedDeletion ran looking for team leaders and members.. I was planning on sending him an email in the morning to double check.. I also wanted to talk to the fellas over at sourceforge first before possibly descending on them with a bunch of people..lol.

While I agree that an exact replica of the debian structure might be over kill it can be used as a reference to put together that is a bit less complex but that can handle conflict resolution and decision making..

keep in mind though that the fellas at sourcefroge are really working on the base functionality not the frills. That is also why I wanted to talk to them.. I want to see what their feelings on this are and hear their ideas.. Heck they may want  nothing to do with this.. won't really know till we talk to them all over there.

Also keep in mind that there are existing efforts here.. I know there is a documentation team, and I think I remember seeing something about a security team as well. we would have to talk with them as well and see where they stand and get their input.

I am not trying to speak for anyone here, but most likely one of 3 things will happen. Either the organization ends up as part of the sourceforge project if they are interested in it. It becomes a separate project that may be working in conjunction with SF, or it becomes it's own stand alone project..

Then we also need to look at where this is all going to be based from.. is it going to be able to continue here or should it happen on a new site.

But it is really to early to make any assumptions. at this point we are just gauging interest.. at some point all the interested parties are going to need to come together and start working out the details (elections for interim leads, discuss organizational methods etc..)

I have to disagree with you on the idea of committies though  girkers. having committies of elected persons for actual decision making can lessen the effect of personal disagreements getting in the way.. also if for what ever reason people think that they are not being represented effectively when the elected persons time is up they can always vote for someone else.

Pete,

How long did you set the poll to run for?

[girkers]

I agree Buddha in that you can not bite the hand that feeds you, nor burn any bridges (excuse the cleches).  We don't want to step on anyones toes nor upset anyone.

It would be nice if we could keep everything here at contribs.org, but obviously this is something that will need to be discussed.

As to the commitee thing, I may have not explained myself very well (this happens alot   ), but commitees are good.  I just think commitee is the wrong word to use in this instance, but if you want to call a group of like minded individuals working towards a robust, well developed distro.  Then cut my legs off and call me shorty, we have a comittee.

[matsk]

The posting moved by the author to:
http://sme.4gurus.org/modules/newbb/viewforum.php?forum=3

[Buddha_Joe]

LOL well then... lol

[wallyrp]

Good Evening,

I have the utmost respect for slords and others that have put blood, sweat, & tears into this project. It is sad that they are going to sourceforge for a new kind of distribution process. From my observation point, it appears that the powers to be at contribs.org are not going to do anything. Now I go back to a question that will not be answered. If someone were to build another site, would the forums be donated (I'm assuming this is what happened) like they were from Mitel to contribs.org then from contribs.org to Lycoris? I'm assuming if the question is never answered, I must be using the wrong word there, donated.

ORGANIZATION IS NEEDED IF FOR NOTHING MORE THAN TO SHOW SOME KIND OF MANAGEMENT OF FINANCES AND FINANCIAL RECORDS. As part of the grand "community" that may or may not have a voice, I sent money at first but became concerned about where it would go as contribs.org went along.

[Buddha_Joe]

I wouldn't worry so much about the content from contribs.org honestly.. It would suck but a new knowledge base could be built. There is no need to try and force the website maintainers into anything they do not want to do.

There are plenty of people who want something a bit more structured and as I understand it there are a couple of initiatives already in the works.. as Jeff has said people can decide with their feet.

But there is no reason why contribs.org can not benifit just as much from these new efforts as they can from contribs.org. There is no reason for this process to become nasty or exclussionary..

Let's keep in mind that Jeff has been gracious enough to let this discussion continue here when it is well with in his rights to nuke it.. granted it may not be a popular decsion but it is his right.

Here is something that may somewhat answer your question.. each of the posts here is owned by their respective authors. That being said there is no reason why permission to use the material can not be sought from the author.. Granted it may be tedious and a bit of a pain, but it can also be a useful exercise in reducing the chaf and extracting out the useful bits of information to be used in generating new howto's and making sure those howto's credit their original source.

[wallyrp]

Good Evening,

Dangit, I'm addicted to this mulberry bush forest. ARrghh...

Let's do this.

1. Jeff organize something, anything for contribs.org It doesn't have to apply to SME just put some <adjective> organization up for contribs.org to manage the posts, threads, monies, etc.
2. Start culling through the huge userlist and attempt to contact every one. Delete those who don't respond within x number of days. This would provide for a <adjective> quorum for an organization to apply to SME.


Jeff, take the leadership role here as you did when contribs.org moved over to Lycoris. You affect this whole thing whether you say so or not. You own the <adjective> domain.

"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it."
-- General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

A leader leads by example, whether he intends to or not.  ~Author Unknown

Leadership is action, not position.  ~Donald H. McGannon

Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.  ~Robert Jarvik

Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.  ~Tom Peters

Now, I understand if you ban me, delete my post, nuke the thread, and/or anything else. You made the decision to get the forums and SME that a lot of people put blood, sweat, and tears into. You made the decision to give those to Lycoris and then take them back. You made the decision to rebuild after the crash with the equipment. You made a lot of decisions, make them again if nothing else, for contribs.org and let SME fall into place.

[mach1_4fun]

heres my 2 cents:

As both a business and a technical kind of guy, I think that a well established structure is nesscessary so that everyone knows where they fit in and what the direction of the project is.

Organizing everything in a logical, public, and agreeable way, I think will be better for everyone, as well as making it easier for other contributors to help out and the rest of the community to help in the whole process.

[pcowley]

<snip>.....</snip>

Pete,

How long did you set the poll to run for?

I ran the poll for 30 days, to give people plenty of time to discuss and think about it.  I think it should be made clear to those who talk about finances, that there are none.  We are talking purely a structure for development effort and visibility.  No need to incorporate or any of that really and already I see that a large proportion of voters don't want the HEAVY constitution based environment (although in my own experience, it is really, really useful to have this stuff in writing for when things go bad).

However, what I believe most people want is:

- What are the groups of effort
- who is working on what
- What is the progress to date on the work being done
- Who to contact for advice
- What is the direction SME is going in

However, to decide something like a road-map for releases requires a concensus decision, and this is really best achieved by a group of the actual developers - The folk doing the real work should get a lot of the say, but that does beg the question of how to resolve conflicts which will occur from time to time.

SO a slimmed down structure is quite possible (and I am NOT against it in the least) and if that is what the majority want, lets do it.  Same for the more complicated (but IMHO more robust)version!

Something has to be done, and as Shad Lords and the others who said they were so fed up waiting for the community to organise they they did the 6.5 release, well that just proves the point that some sort, any sort of organisation is preferable to nothing at all.

As a long time lurker, the most I can do at this point is stimulate discussion, run a poll and if the results of the poll represent enough of the community, we go use the poll result to do somthing to improve our situation.

Hipefully that will be a win-win situation for everyone.

Cheers
Pete

[keepright]

- people who genuinely want to help or are committed to the project but are not able to help with either code or support in the forums.  Sometimes these people donate money, most often not.

I come under this type of person.

Currently the only reason I use ClarkConnect over SME is stabilty of the distro. And I dont mean in an operating system sence, I mean in a reliability that next week, month, year I will still be able to find support and updates for the distro.

Thanks for your time.

[girkers]

It's funny that this topic has over 1000 views, which I find quite funny as we have only had 52 votes.  To me it shows that whilst people are interested in what is going on, most don't want to get involved.

But for the few of us that have continued on in this discussion that "do" want to do something about the state of the distro, the time is now.

"Seize the day" - someone famous

I believe and support the question raised by wallyrp, is that for us to start any of this we need to know if Jeff is going to support the movement through contribs.org.  Whichever way he decides to go I will support him in that decision as he is the owner of this domain (so I am lead to believe).

Once this has been sorted we then need to move forward, like the initiative taken by matsk.  I believe though before jumping ship that we need to give contribs.org the opportunity to decide on its position in this context, as it has already given so much to the SME community.

If in the unfortunate event that contribs.org does not wish to continue along the path that we here are trying to forge, whilst being unfortunate we have to respect his decision and move on.

So contribs.org, what's it going to be?

[dave_d]

Hello!

Let me say right at the beginning that I'm very interested in the continued existance and development of the SME server product.

I have been using SME server since about e-Smith version 4.splot!  In and around where I live and work I have 7 SME servers in production environments, and 5 of these have never been rebooted since installation - the longest is close on 4 years without intervention.  I have another 8 - 10 SME servers in support/test/evaluation modes and they too are behaving flawlessly.

I have to say that only VAX/VMS or Alpha/VMS machines have demonstrated this kind of reliability to date and so I'm very much a fan of the SME box.  Also, there's no detailed GUI and so inquisitive users/owners simple don't have the ability to 'go poking around in the works' - a definite plus for me!

I suppose I'm much like many users.  I like there to be 'official releases' from time to time as these always provide anchor points in the continued development of the product.  I like the 'contribs.org' as well.  I don't think in all my 35+ years in the IT industry that I ever got such fast responses to problems that I've encountered.  I like too that I can 'do my own thing' from time to time AND I can post these efforts into an open area where other people can make what they will of them.

I expect too that I'm one of these people who always expect there to be some sort of 'organisation' behind a project like SME server and it can come as a bit of a shock to realize that the organisation is, in reality, very thin and held together by nothing much more than a will to keep something that is good going!

So what would I like to see?  Well, it would help if I knew more about some of the 'grandees' involved.  I see - and have communicated with - names like Charley Brady, Greg Swallow, RequestedDeletion, smeghead, slord (to name the first 5 that came into my head), but I don't know where these guys fit into the 'organisation'. For users like me, knowing what folk do and where they fit in is all part of the confidence building exercise that is needed for me to build the confidence in the product that I then pass on to potential end users.

I suppose too that I would like there to be some sort of a controlling body that decided what went into an official release. Such a body need not necessarily consist of 'king coders' but should probably comprise of one or two experienced administrators with technical knowledge who had available to them some sort of a testing team to ensure that the official releases were stable and as fault free as possible.

Finally, the existing contribs.org simply needs to be maintained.  It seems to me that the raw material for 'official releases' is almost always to be found in the various sections of 'contribs' and so the controlling body OUGHT (??) to have a relatively easy time when deciding when to move to a new release.

As for development, I rather suspect that this would take place 'automagically' under such a simple yet well defined structure. It's been my experience over may years that the best developments are usually in very small areas and are often done by dedicated programmers/analysts who simply find themselves in a bind and resolve their problem by doing a bit of development work.  I think in all my working life I've met only 4 or 5 people prepared to take on the development of a whole system voluntarily!! - and they didn't seem to have home lives!

I voted for option 1.  I like the idea of adopting a system that already works.  Because it would be adopting a working system, it would also be adapting a working system and so option 2 is really tightly bound to option 1 (in my mind).  Also, option 1 already had more votes and so I chose to strengthen the case for adopting something positive rather than doing nothing.

So, these are my rambling, disconnected thoughts - but it proves I'm interested, at least!

Regards,

Dave


     

[smeghead]

dave_d you flatter me, to be mentioned in the same breath as the e-smith demigods charlie & shad, I will have to print and frame this post

Gotta say I like the idea of structure as a guide and not a constraint.  Due the size of this project and the # of bodies available to fill any position a stucture would need to be fairly flat and reasonably informal.

Providing the best possible assistance and support to those most skilled and knowledgeable in the project should be paramount.  If we can lighten the load on these augsut individuals then we can help both our beloved distro & its developers (the latter to get more of a life at least); what will happen if these guys just get burned out with all the effort and an ever increasing load?

I vote option 2

[Damian]

dave_d summed it up for me. I'm in the same boat, advising businesses to install SME instead of other Enterprise Linux distros due to it's stability and cost.
SME is a business tool and the direction should come from a mixture of devs and customer-facing guys. That way when all the hard work on the next feature/release is done it will be appealing to the business community and will continue to expand its installed base.
Don't assume everyone's caught up with this thread yet - I've been buried in building 3 high profile 6.01 servers and haven't cecked the forum for new posts since feb 27th.
I'm heading over to vote now
Damian