Hay equipo ? / What a team is ? II

Laurence Rozier laurence.rozier at gmail.com
Mon Feb 4 22:53:17 UTC 2008


On Feb 4, 2008 7:06 AM, cdrick <cdrick65 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > But we don't have Jean Todt now.
> >
> >I very happy if some Master take the lead.
>
> I find the comparison quite pertinent actually... especially if you
> remember the state of Ferrari F1 team before Jean Todt arrived.
> Ferrari, was still the oldest and most succesful, but results were not
> the best at all...
> I think Todt brought a direction and some coherence in a team full of
> talented and passionnated people... It's not a question of raw
> competences but more of communication... Squeak need coherence,
> organisation (to me)... Stephane tried but got burned, Ralph
> dissapeared (hope nothing bad)...
>
> Who's next ? I would suggest Andreas takes a role in the new team if
> he'd like... not the main one maybe, but a role... especially I like
> him to implement a simpler traits system. Traits was a first try
> (personnaly, I don't use them for now but why removing them if they
> are harmless). Stephane has always recognized the implementation
> wasn't ideal (especially the metaclass stuff that I have no idea of).
> Andreas suggested a simpler implementation (without the
> meta-problems). I'd love he gives a try but please don't throw traits
> immediatly...
>
> my very 2 cents
>
> Cédrick


Thanks Edgar & Cédrick! This analogy is useful in many respects. There is
without question a need for coherence - a Jean Todt. At the same time, one
can zoom out slightly and see that the race team is a participant in an
ecosystem <http://www.rhythmeering.com/the-7-factors/participants/> where
Ferrari competes in symbiosis with various sponsors(Shell has 5 people at
each race<http://www.shell.com/home/content/ferrari-en/formula_one_2007/2007_biographies/dir_trackside.html>for
example). While there is at least some degree of inherent
tension/conflict wrt motivations and goals, everyone in the Ferrari
ecosystem is focused on having drivers/cars that win consistently. That's
why Jean Todt was hired and why I keep mentioning the role of the visible
projects. They can be either sponsors or winning cars/drivers but it's hard
to see how the work being being released under the Squeak Foundation banner
can succeed without the participation of mission-focused entities. Even if a
large group of people take up some of the excellent ideas mentioned in
Paul's recent JVM post, unless the goal is to maintain a small niche, there
will still be a need for "anchor" entities. Now there's nothing inherently
wrong with small niches, it's just that Smalltalk/Squeak has so much
potential that people tend to want to share it broadly.


Cheers,

Laurence
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20080204/beac9459/attachment.htm


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list