Hi fellow Squeakers!

Pour yourself a cup of coffee, grab hold of your keyboard and read the
rest of this posting - even if it *is* long. Ok? :)

	"Are we rising again?" "No. On the contrary." "Are we descending?"
"Worse than that, captain!
	we are falling!" "For Heaven's sake heave out the ballast!" "There! the
last sack is empty!"
	"Does the balloon rise?" "No!" "I hear a noise like the dashing of
waves. The sea is below the
	car! It cannot be more than 500 feet from us!" "Overboard with every
weight! . . .
	everything!"

Thus starts chapter 1, "Dropped from the clouds", of the book "The
Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne. The Mysterious Island follows the
adventures of a group of five castaways who use their survivalist savvy
to build a functional community on an uncharted, faraway, fantastic
island of bewildering goings-on.

Our sacred balloon is also in trouble. We need to loose weight because
we are drowning in endless debates and non functional processes. We need
to get a good lightweight leadership in place. This island, the future,
is also full of wonders but still largely uncharted. Can we succeed in
building a functional community? Yes, we can. So, "dropped from the
clouds", we will try:

The Castaways
-----------------

The last six days there has been some off list activity in forming a new
leadership for Squeak. Yes, you read it right - the Guides are now
*officially retired*. From this point and forward there is a new
*temporary* group consisting of five castawa... eh people, that now
leads Squeak:

	- Göran Krampe
	- Doug Way
	- Cees de Groot
	- Marcus Denker
	- Michael Rueger

This group reads squeak-dev of course, but is also reachable at:

	mysterious-island at discuss.squeakfoundation.org

We are *leading* the Squeak community, not guiding. Well, that was the
summary, you have questions? That's odd. :) Read on.


Questions and Answers
--------------------------

Q: How on earth did this happen? :)

Well, very sudden. I (Göran) got a sudden urge/jolt/whatever six days
ago and just ran with the ball. This is NOT a reaction against the
current ongoing SqF formation (see below) - in fact - it is rather the
opposite.

Q: How does this relate to the Squeakfoundation formation going on?

First of all, only some of you know (not publicly announced yet, so I am
spilling the beans here) that there is a SqueakFoundation formation
process recently started. It aims to put a real foundation in place with
capacity of real funding etc and this work continues. A lot of people
are involved in that process and we have high hopes for it.

Us five castaways are not leading that process, Stephane Ducasse and
Michael Rueger are (Michael is in our group too, but whatever). The idea
is that the castaways is temporarily in charge, *until* and *if* SqF
delivers a scheme for forming a new leadership. When and how that will
happen, we do not know.

Also note that everyone in this group is actively participating in the
SqF formation. Finally, we think forming this leadership will help the
SqF formation a lot - because now there is a group leading that can take
decisions and implement suggestions, and pave the way forward.

Q: Who gave you permission to do this "coup" you sneaky bastards!?

Noone did, because before today there was no decisional body or forum
that could grant it to us! This is the first step - an interim group
that stands up, takes charge and leads. One important thing though - the
former Guides and Stephane Ducasse (leading the SqF formation process)
stands behind this new group and support us.

We are also all dedicated to the community - and you who know who we are
can attest to that. This is NOT some "hostile takeover" of any kind. We
are doing this hoping for ALL your support and we expect to not let you
down. We are putting ourselves on the line here. We are taking on the
responsibility and hope we can deliver.

Q: Why aren't the other three guides in the group?

This is a group specifically focused on community decision-making,
building consensus etc. Ned, Craig and Tim (the former guides not in
this new group) are all top notch Squeak developers but they are quite
busy doing what they do best - cranking out cool code. And this group
both needs to be rejuvenated and to be small. Ned, Craig and Tim or
anyone else will get their chance of being in this group in the future,
since we are only grabbing a temporary "mandate".

Q: What does temporary mean exactly?

We don't know. 6 months, a year? We will see. But it IS temporary in any
case, if SqF hasn't formed a replacement scheme - then we will solve it
some other way, like for example by putting a new group in place.

Q: What is this group called? Mysterious Island is a bit long...

Yeah. :) Castaways? Settlers? Silly-sods-taking-all-the-crap? Hehe, you
decide.

Q: What happens now?

In day-to-day practice not much revolutionary will happen immediately.
Things continue mostly like before - but there are a few big differences
in how the community will operate:

	- Decisions that needs to be made for Squeak will in the end be made by
us. Of course, the discussions are as open as always right here on
squeak-dev, and we are not claiming to know everything - people with the
knowledge still affect the process just like always. In fact, this is
more of a responsibility than anything else. We take the responsibility
to make the decisions instead of just having discussions turning into
endless debate.

	- You can always ask us. Since we now make the decisions and thus,
consequentially, form the direction forward for Squeak - we should be
able to answer any questions with authority. This helps the community a
lot.

	- Any and all Squeak issues should be discussed just like before, on
squeak-dev. Yes, we do have the private list mentioned above - but it
will not contain any discussion except for when we think it is needed to
do it privately. The Guides did everything openly. We do not and we
require at least a small private forum in order to operate well.

Other than that, the plans haven't been made yet. We have promised to
take a good look at the roadmap Stephane has presented and will probably
do that as one of our first tasks. And all the other things going on at
this moment continues as before, like the restarted partitioning of the
image etc.

How we will organize within our group, with roles and how decisions are
tracked etc, well, we haven't decided yet. But from now on you can use
mysterious-island at discuss.squeakfoundation.org to reach all of us. More
on that later.

So if you want to alert us and make sure your issue isn't drowning in
squeak-dev, use the above. We are of course all reading squeak-dev, but
sometimes the traffic can be intense and CCing to the above will make
sure we can filter it out.

If anyone has additional questions - feel free to just reply to this
posting (on squeak-dev) and we will try hard to answer. :)

regards, Göran Krampe on behalf of the castaways