[ANN][IMPORTANT] New leadership formed!

Cees de Groot cg at cdegroot.com
Wed Feb 16 08:12:35 UTC 2005


On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:15:45 -0400, Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> They can say they are our commanders all they like, but it will never  
> make it so.
>
That's up the community to decide, and your statement represents your  
opinion. Whether the community agrees with you remains to be seen, but I  
do take (slight) offence that us sticking our necks out because we think  
it is necessary is met with such harsh words as yours. We're not doing  
this because we're power-hungry or something, but because we analyzed  
things and thought it was necessary.

I do agree that it's not automatic that the 'power' we 'took' is also  
granted to us by the community, but please let's keep this discussion  
civilized, shall we? We're all volunteers here, doing the best we can.

> And what is the point of this power grab, anyway?  There is no crisis!
>
The crisis is mostly in how to take Squeak to a level where all the  
various groups can continue to do their job without having to continuously  
deal with the other groups' output (or fork - forking seems to be in vogue  
these days, and that's never a good sign). You can be happy with how the  
community performs, but I noticed a lot of frustration, degrading quality  
of the main image, and no process in place for making decisions. We hope  
to temporarily patch that, so that the SqF formation effort may  
concentrate on getting something more permanent in place.

> The community has done well over the years by two approaches: put up
> services that people can voluntarily use, and--when we have to agree on
> something--discuss it on the mailing list until a rough concensus is
> reached.
However, often there is no concensus reached. There's nobody around who  
says - look guys, there's pros and contras to every proposed solution, we  
need to do something, we'll do X. Concensus usually is reached only over  
obvious things, that's easy enough. For everything else, you need a  
different process.

> Community members, if any of you go along with this, the result will be
> massive fragmentation of what community we have left.  Already, external
> groups have left the squeak-dev-led Squeak because they do not feel
> represented.
>
I wonder how this meshes with your earlier comments that the community is  
all happy and everything's sailing along, Lex...

> If a large portion of the community does follow them, then
> an even larger portion will fork off and make NetSqueak... then
> FreeSqueak... then OpenSqueak....
>
Now, here you have exactly our mission statement: prevent this (you forgot  
Squeak/i386 and friends ;))

> Gentlemen on the "in" list:  Instead of spending those 6-7 days
> discussing how best to make a power grab, I wish you had spent that time
> working on a concrete proposal for a proper democratic organization.
Maybe that is exactly the output of our work. You assume that we want to  
blindfold ourselves in order to protect us from the community, take the  
rudder, steer the ship and whoever stays on board is in it for the ride.  
However, our mission is to find out what's hurting in the community, why  
these groups are leaving, and repair that. If that's best dealt with by a  
democratic process, fine with me. I'm so notoriously not power hungry that  
I've spent my last year resigning from various boards, and I hope to do  
that here a.s.a.p. :)

> Everyone:  Let us keep moving forward as I proposed before.  Let us
> thoroughly packagize Squeak, so that there are fewer central decisions
> that have to be made at all.
>
Which is a very good idea. One that we've been debating for quite some  
time, but somehow never got decided upon because everyone's drowning in  
discussions and work and...

> And let's proceed to *carefully* build a proper democratic organization,
> for those few times that we must make group agreements.
Absolutely. But *careful* building tends to take time. We're just trying  
to bridge that gap.

Will I convince you with this posting? I don't know - you seem to have  
made up your mind instead of cutting us a bit of slack and seeing what  
happens. We're well aware that before the community actually grants is any  
form of decision making power, we've got to earn it. And that's our first  
agenda point, how to do that. I would hope that you could at least hold  
your judgement a bit until we get rolling. But I also do hope that you'll  
keep firing criticisms at us wherever you think that we're in danger of  
damaging the community (the single post by Goran will not, you will agree  
here), it's very necessary that we're kept on our toes ;)



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