Need to do something

Ken Causey ken at kencausey.com
Wed Oct 12 17:07:33 UTC 2005


In my opinion a big (HUGE) step in the direction towards improving this
situation is developing the Stewarding system where teams take
responsibility for image categories and packages.  The idea here is that
for any given class in the system there is a dedicated person (or
hopefully group) that has accepted reponsibility for it and has
undertaken to become an expert on it.  We call such a person a Steward
and the team under him or her a Steward Team.

The Harvester's job is then reduced whenever an issue appears related to
this class.  The Steward(s) for the class will handle the issue and come
to agreement on the appropriate action.  Once agreement has been reached
they will hand off a complete and ready solution to the Harvesters.  The
Harvesters then can have confidence in the solution (built up over time
because they have developed confidence in the Steward(s)) and can give
it some quick automatic checks and shove it into the update stream
(whatever form that happens to take).  In time once the Harvesters have
built up enough confidence in a particular Steward team perhaps that
team can simply inject fixes directly into the update stream and not
require any time from the Harvesters.

Right now Goran and I are spiking the day to day business of Stewarding
and trying to work out how it will work on the lowest levels.  I really
hope that by the end of the week I will be able to produce a document
explaining the concept in detail and what it entails and once more call
for participation by the community.

More soon....

Ken

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 09:28 -0700, Chris Muller wrote:
> I was attempting to stimulate discussion of Stef's concern from a social angle,
> not so much a technical one.
> 
> To repeat the question:  Is there a solution that can direct the energy we have
> in abundance (people creating things and "improving" existing things) toward
> the tasks that currently consume a the energy of a select few (harvesting these
> creations and improvements) in a way that gives us everything we have now
> (community discussion, review, testing, etc.).
> 
> My lame, hypothetical implementation dream that followed was meant only to
> provide an illustrative context for this different social approach than what we
> have now; i.e., distributed harvestation vs. centralized and what are the
> implications?
> 
> Stef asked for ideas to make a "self-supporting" process.  Please forgive for a
> moment that it will be hard to get there.  I am still just trying to clarify
> where "there" is and hoping to learn something from you guys in the process..
> 
> Regards,
>   Chris
> 
> 
> > Message: 15
> > Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 23:55:55 +0200
> > From: Michael Rueger <michael at impara.de>
> > Subject: Re: Need to do something
> > To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
> > 	<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> > Message-ID: <434C34EB.5080802 at impara.de>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> > 
> > Chris Muller wrote:
> > 
> > > Stop pushing them through Mantis or any other external tool.  Instead, we
> > write
> > > a program that integrates into Squeak that allows anyone to submit directly
> > > from the alpha image.  These submissions appear on everyones list.  Later
> > the
> > 
> > NIH all over again. Things never seem to be hard to implement, but we 
> > are having this discussion because people are running out of energy 
> > harvesting, let alone writing yet another tool for crying out loud...
> >
> > We just moved to Mantis because the other approach didn't work...
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