[squeak-dev] Election 2008: Your Questions, My Answers

1. Approximately, how much time do you plan on spending on Squeak during the
   coming year (in any kind of unit)?

My company is concentrating this year on building a presence in the Smalltalk
world, mostly through the promotion of cross-platform web frameworks such as
Seaside.  This goal requires that I create and deliver talks, courses, blog
entries, and publications on Smalltalk-related items in a major way.  I see
Squeak as an essential component of that effort, and will be spending at least
one or two days a week completely immersed in understanding Squeak code,
writing Squeak code for the core and for separate packages, and writing about
Squeak.

2. What are in your mind the three most important issues (not necessarily
   technical) we need to address in the coming year?

* Get Squeak's license resolved.
* Leverage off of Ruby's success to relaunch Smalltalk for webapps.
* Get the mismash of add-on mechanisms resolved: Adding items to Squeak
  should be as easy (or easier) than installing CPAN modules.

3. What is your view on fund raising and how any such collected money should
   be dealt with?

Needs should be identified *before* money requests are made.  Funding a
specific project always results in a far more receptive audience.  Heck, as
Stonehenge, I've contributed some major cash to specific projects, and very
little to "general funds".  I've founded a few non-profits over the years,
including launching short-lived Perl Institute and the follow-on PerlMongers,
and have been involved peripherally with the Perl Foundation.  I also have
worked with 18 of the Fortune 100, so I have a pretty clear idea about how
corps want to deal with outside non-profit organizations.

4. What is your view on the ongoing process of making SqueakFoundation a
   not-for-profit legal entity?

SqF should *not* be a separate charitable organization... it takes far too
much time and effort to do that, for very little gain.  SqF should be under
some umbrella organization that can handle individual donations.  However, SqF
*should* get (or continue to maintain) legal designation as a "non-profit",
which allows certain donations from corporations to be received directly.  And
this will be necessary for project-based contributions (see #3).

5. Do you think the Team model is appropriate for organising our efforts or
   should we come up with something else?

According to the Screen Director's Guild, a movie has always only one
director.  That's because, ultimately, there will be lower level conflicts,
and it takes arbitration to resolve it ultimately, and this is the Director's
role.  The director also always holds the "vision" of the entire project,
and can communicate that as needed.

In this case, Squeak needs a "benevolent dictator" to make the ultimate
choices, but will most certainly delegate most of the actual work to trustable
lieutenants.  Squeak-by-committee will stagnate and be equally useless to
everyone.  I don't see the Dictator role as a permanent one, but it's
definitely a necessary role, and should be filled.  In the Perl world, Larry
Wall is the ultimate "BD", but every Perl release has a "Pumpking", which has
very clear authority to resolve any issues as they see fit.  Squeak needs
this.

6. Do you have any specific views on how the Squeak board and the Squeak
   community should work together with the Squeak satellite communities
   (Croquet, Seaside, Sophie, Squeakland, Scratch etc), also referred to as
   "stakeholder communities"?

Clearly, each of these communities has separate needs and desires.  They
should be willing to provide their part of the puzzle, but the Squeak core
must provide the basic mechanisms and extension paths to support the majority
of these communities.

7. The squeak.org release is our most important asset. How do you see it
   evolving over the next few years?

I'd like to see something like Perlmonks erupt somewhere.  It's an amazing
asset.  "Squeakmonks" would not be a replacement for mailing lists and
newsgroups, but a good google-viewed database of questions and answers and
corrected answers, with some incentive to provide correct answers, would be
very useful to the Squeak community.  Most of what I know about Squeak I got
from folklore... it'd be nice if that folklore could be passed on in a
googleable way.

8. Do you have any thoughts on the current relicensing effort?

It's mandatory.  And for my purposes, it's mandatory that it be licensed with
an MIT or BSD style license, so that my customers can continue to develop
applications in Squeak and deploy it in commercial environments that would be
perhaps open-source hostile.

9. How would you like Squeak to be positioned in the open source world in year
   2012?

If my efforts are fruitful, RubyOnRails will be gone.  Everyone will be using
Seaside or Aida or the nextgen of that. :)

10. What do you see as the overall role of the board?

Leadership.  This means listening to the needs, and finding ways to get the
problems out of the way, so that the contributors can get their job done.  It
also means advocacy and marketing, so that Squeak is seen as a viable choice
for projects.

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
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