After OOoCon 


OOoCon, everyone agreed was a success. A fabulous success. It built community and also gave everyone the space to publicly discuss how they thought things could be better. I think that most of the complaints could be aggregated under issues relating to process--how things are done--and structure--how they can be done. Both, substantially revolve around Sun's longtime involvement and effective control of OpenOffice.org. I'm not saying Sun's involvement is bad--far from it!--I think rather that the project has reached a level of maturity where it is important to consider how to improve matters so that more developers and other would-be contributors can participate within the meritocracy.

How can we solve these problems? Well, OOo has the Community Council and Engineering Steering Committee. The former is charged with addressing general community problems, as well as doing some strategy, the latter with developer concerns. I'd suggest that a special meeting, perhaps held via IRC, be held in the ESC to directly address the lack of trust, the false conceptions, and so on. The CC can also engage in a related meeting, and make an effort to promote *what* OOo is, *how* to contribute, and how to resolve problems in communication and representation.

But these points are all well and good but they run up against the fact of the limits of the CC and ESC's power to effect change among those actually making the code that OOo uses. In short, given that Sun is the primary sponsor and creator of code for OpenOffice.org, it is substantially up to them to resolve some of the problems sketched above and relating to how submissions of code are handled.

Would a Foundation, by which I mean the creation of a non-profit independent organisation holding OpenOffice.org's intellectual property, change things? or, rather, How would it change things? What opportunities would it provide us?

It would be foolish to imagine that a Foundation would be a panacea and magically improve processes in handing code submissions and community integration. We need before we get to that step to fix things where we can. We've already started. I have not posted the minutes to the latest Council meeting, but it was agreed there that the release cycle would be shortened and accelerated, meaning that the features and code that community members contribute would be presented that much faster. But that's just one part. We need also to be more attentive to the mentoring needs of new contributors, and to generally make it easier for contributors to engage with established members, as well as to learn the process, project, code. Better developer documentation has been cited as a desiderata, and I think it is something we should encourage the development of.

All this, our growing pains, can and should be addressed as soon as possible; they already are, but we need to be insistent in improving things. We need to include the community, or communities, in the process of making the product from the ground up; OpenOffice.org is the community's but only insofar as they make it theirs. 

OOoCon, everyone agreed was a success. A fabulous success. It built community and also gave everyone the space to publicly discuss how they thought things could be better. I think that most of the complaints could be aggregated under issues relating to process--how things are done--and structure--how they can be done. Both, substantially revolve around Sun's longtime involvement and effective control of OpenOffice.org. I'm not saying Sun's involvement is bad--far from it!--I think rather that the project has reached a level of maturity where it is important to consider how to improve matters so that more developers and other would-be contributors can participate within the meritocracy.

How can we solve these problems? Well, OOo has the Community Council and Engineering Steering Committee. The former is charged with addressing general community problems, as well as doing some strategy, the latter with developer concerns. I'd suggest that a special meeting, perhaps held via IRC, be held in the ESC to directly address the lack of trust, the false conceptions, and so on. The CC can also engage in a related meeting, and make an effort to promote *what* OOo is, *how* to contribute, and how to resolve problems in communication and representation.

But these points are all well and good but they run up against the fact of the limits of the CC and ESC's power to effect change among those actually making the code that OOo uses. In short, given that Sun is the primary sponsor and creator of code for OpenOffice.org, it is substantially up to them to resolve some of the problems sketched above and relating to how submissions of code are handled.

Would a Foundation, by which I mean the creation of a non-profit independent organisation holding OpenOffice.org's intellectual property, change things? or, rather, How would it change things? What opportunities would it provide us?

It would be foolish to imagine that a Foundation would be a panacea and magically improve processes in handing code submissions and community integration. We need before we get to that step to fix things where we can. We've already started. I have not posted the minutes to the latest Council meeting, but it was agreed there that the release cycle would be shortened and accelerated, meaning that the features and code that community members contribute would be presented that much faster. But that's just one part. We need also to be more attentive to the mentoring needs of new contributors, and to generally make it easier for contributors to engage with established members, as well as to learn the process, project, code. Better developer documentation has been cited as a desiderata, and I think it is something we should encourage the development of.

All this, our growing pains, can and should be addressed as soon as possible; they already are, but we need to be insistent in improving things. We need to include the community, or communities, in the process of making the product from the ground up; OpenOffice.org is the community's but only insofar as they make it theirs. 

Posted: Thu - October 6, 2005 at 11:35 PM          

©