On 1/1/06, Juan Vuletich jmvsqueak@uolsinectis.com.ar wrote:
Your idea sounds good and logical. The problem I see is finding someone to lead the efforts in each area. For example, the UI part. I'm the leader of the Morphic Stewards team, and I'm having a hard time just to find enough free time for reviewing the fixes and enhancements that are candidate for publishing.
This may sound like a dumb statement from a management 101 book, but "leading a team" does not equal "doing all the team's work". If you are the only one reviewing fixes and enhancements, something's not ticking in the team...
But I can't take responsibility for other UI stuff, like MVC, ToolBuilder.
ToolBuilder would probably not be a part of the UI team, because it is a separately maintained project. And MVC, well... it is in maintenance mode, quite solid, and "all" you'd need to do as a team leader is to find someone with an interest in MVC, get that person on your team, and delegate the responsibility. In effect a sort of a subteam. The whole idea behind my proposal is to see what subteams do arise, and only if they grow to enough weight (lots of work done, lots of team members, etcetera) to form a separate team.
And of course Tweak is to be handled by Andreas when released. Actually, I'd like to go in the opposite direction. I'd like to handle Etoys to someone with real interest and knowledge of it.
I think the SqueakLand folk should have the responsibility for Etoys. Certainly formally, but quite likely helped by squeak-dev'ers with an interest. Getting SqueakLand into the community development model for Squeak would help getting the two communities to operate more closely.
We are all busy people!
That was actually the main reason I voiced the idea. Because that means we need to be very efficient - if we assume we don't want to have "one man teams", we'd need to have 20-30 people at least, all fragmented over various tiny (thus vulnerable) teams, maintaining all these mailing lists, scattering information, etcetera. Much better to have these 20-30 people, who are all busy, work in teams of 4-6 people (from my experience, that's a reasonably balance, size-wise, between high vulnerability and high bureaucracy).
Yes, the team lead position will become slightly "heavier" (but only slightly so, I think), but overall the community will be able to crank out more work for the same amount of time put in.