Hi guys
The email was originally targeted to the people that expressed their will to participate to the squeakFoundation ie: brad@sonaural.com, christophe.tricot@univ-savoie.fr, klaus.witzel@cobss.ch, krivanek@comtalk.net and I hesitated to send this mail to everybody, but I feel that it is important after discussing with daniel.
I want to let you know that our objectives is not to get all the power. We did the foundation because we wanted to provide a better organization to Squeak development. In particular we want to put in place an organization that structures Squeak growth. Our goal at the end is to be able to redraw from the core organization and that the development and process continues. At the end of the day we like compilers and MOPs and hacking in Squeak.
***Our goal is that if YOU want to participate you can and have fun and satisfaction doing it.***
But we wanted to protect our times from "customers having too much needs and not enough help to offer". Daniel is thinking that we concentrate all the powers (I would say too much responsibilities) and I propose him to propose a way to let people participate in the organization (see the task list below).
This is a long mail (I do not like them but this one is important so please read it).
Here are the tasks for which we are looking people for:
- PR person: we need someone to do announce in the press/blog/ squeakFoundation and Squeak news I like the reports made by Giovanno (I guess) and goran but we need someone to report in the direction of the outside. Following the same way having an editor for the wiki/website to have consistency is important too. Klaus you seemed interested into that so let us know.
- sending letters to supporters (noury made some Word document with variables for that and I did some latex templates)
- managing the merchandising Tim gave us the permission to use the squeak logos he did. I did some logos for the squeakfoundation and I gave them to the squeakfoundation, I will try to find some time to make specific logoes for supporters. I asked bert to know if we can use his balloon for merchandising. Pavel could we use your balloon (the swiss one, savoie one for merchandising)
- maintaining the mailing-lists: we need a supporter mailing-list so that we can contact the supporters we would like to have someone else to maintain the sqf mailing-list not because this is tedious or a bad job but because we do not want to give the impression that we are concentrating all the power.
- managing the CD/DVDs kind of Squeak Distribution Until recently this is mainly alex and marcus (originally me using an old cd) that build the esug then the squeak cd. Having a group of people working on an offer would be great: for teachers (with the slides ready to use - I made new slides and videos that can be used) for etoyer for videos The idea is that we should have different offers so that organizations having money (universities) can pay a squeak distro the same way they pay other software but at the same time have Squeak distribution for individuals.
- setting up a way to have kind of elections: daniel suggested that we have a kind of election mechanism. We are not against as soon as there is a minimal entry level: voting people should have the credit to do it (because they did something for squeak or with squeak....). Now we do not have the time to work on that. But we are really ready to follow a simple and efficient schema. Our goal is that people feel involved and I realized that we certainly gave the wrong impression here because we were too impatient (more than 8 months) and wanted to make things moving. But people like us spending a lot of time should be protected too or they will leave.
- Defining a way to collect and sort the actions that the squeakfoundation wants to enable dumping what we had in mind was: - book support - presentation at conference support - dev support - media support.... I think that here we should have a board to vote on budget (we do that within ESUG and it works) but for that we need money :)
- Define a way to collect and sort the fix and important stuff to develop for the community for example, investigating the semaphore problems of certain vm, the weak array problems improving Squeaksource or MC, supporting the harvesting fixing process, are the kinds of problems I have in mind
- Defining a process to take actions: I thought that every month we could get a target, budget it if necessary and achieving it. Then reporting it and stop with target requiring money when there is no money anymore.
- Having a Squeak portal/FAQ/ is important. As soon as the new website is up and running, cleaning and migrating the wiki would be an important task. I know that some of you express the ideas of cleaning the squeak swiki.
- Moving squeakfoundation to www.squeakfoundation.org when the new squeak web site is running. I will help jason to port the new squeak web site to a new wiki server then I plan to migrate the squeak foundation web site. May be paying the guy of squeak.de to maintain the web site could be an idea.
- We need two key keepers: the ideas is that each time we create an account for anything, we send these persons the pass and crucial information to avoid to be in the situation that happened with the first version of the website.
- Making a separate organisation with statues.
- Contact companies to support the squeak foundation
We like the coordinator and team model so the sqfoundation does not want to subsitute it: goran even if we were afraid about it at the beginning is doing a good job and the model seems to work.
Stef
I will start teaching from next week so I will be less reactive but still commited
squeak-fr@lists.squeakfoundation.org