[Squeakfoundation]Nudge, nudge!

[Jörn Eyrich]

Cees de Groot wrote:
> 
> Joern.Eyrich@brokat.com said:
> > But I admit I have difficulties with this chaordic thing (I nearly
> > fainted when I read that many organizations take a year or more to go
> > through the process...).
> 
> Well, organizations are often setup for "eternity". What's a measly year
> compared to that?

Yeah, well .. but ... life's short, you know ;-)?

> > On the other hand, I don't want the Squeak Foundation ...
> > * to only be a philosophizing (?) debating club
> 
> Neither do I. Nor do I want to quickly throw together a SqF and have us all
> discover that we didn't want /that/ SqF in 6 months. The idea is to do a bit
> of structured thinking work up front (and I think that the Chaordic process
> helps with that) so we can do more useful things later on.

This wasn't meant as a criticism of the current process. What I meant
was no
matter *how* we go about setting up the foundation, there's always the
chance
that once it's active, there will be much discussion and nearly no
tangible
results.
The important word for me here is "only". The statement would have
been more
balanced had I added "Blind activism without thinking won't get us
anywhere,
either, though."

> However, it seems that there's not much interest in this process. Which is a
> pity, because it is one of the few ways I know to get all the agendas on the
> table, get an inventory of who are /really/ interested enough to put in some
> work, etcetera. A pessimist would say at this point that SqF can't reckon on
> broad support. An optimist thinks that I simply fail to drive home how
> important a bit of thinking and philosophizing (without reverting to BDUF) is
> :).

Well, the process sounds intrigueing (sp?) somehow, but I have
problems with
the strict top down approach. On the the chaordic web site once they
speak of
"dimensions" instead of "steps" - this appeals more to me, implying
that the
different aspects should be thought of and evolved simultaneously;
maybe I just
like the "cha" part better than the "ord" part.

In other words, what I'm suggesting is more of a brainstorming type of
approach: Collect people's ideas for whichever aspect of SqF and then
take a
step back and organize the stuff.
What do others think?

> Apart from the last two points (about the "small circle" - I'd rather have a
> proxy voting mechanism or something like that in place for decision making) I
> think it's a very useful list of items.

Thanks. I concentrated on the stable, traditional-dev-env aspect of
Squeak.
I hope people with more fantasy will also make suggestions about
various new
directions for squeak.

> However, the /only/ way to give the
> SqF the power of authority to actually pull this through is when either we as
> a community setup a broadly carried SqF through a process like the current
> one, or we sit back and wait for SqC to do so (that is of course what
> basically happened with ApacheF). I think the results will be much better if
> we, as a community, do this.

Actually, I would be delighted if we could integrate the views and
desires of
as many people as possible. It's just that in my experience the
chances of
success are proportional to the inverse square of the number of people
involved (similar to the collective IQ of a group ;-) ); but then,
people
often characterize me as a pessimist ...

I think people will be pragmatic here. If SqF is useful to them, they
won't
care if its members were elected or appointed by SqC (or even
appointed
themselves); if it's not useful to them, they will ignore it no matter
how
its authority was legitimated.

But as Andrew C. Greenberg would probably put, it: Reasonable people
may disagree.
And I encourage you to do so on this list.

> Anyway, people are busy, so I wanted to wait another week before taking a
> "despair" measure and simply copy the NAMA list over :-).

Hey, we could call SqF the "International Rodent Alliance" and
actually save some
typing with that - but IRA, hm... maybe not

In my experience, it's easier for people to comment on a proposal
(hey, I don't
agree with that; hey, I miss xyz in this) than to volunteer their own
ideas.
Maybe it is a good idea to just copy for a start and invite people to
comment on
it.