[squeak-dev] Squeak Leadership Team Meeting Notes for March 19th, 2009

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this report you can
either reply to me directly or within this thread on squeak-dev.  This
report will also be published to our team blog when it is ready and once
that is done I will mention the link in reply to this thread.

The Squeak Leadership Team met on Thursday March 19th.  This was the
first meeting of the newly elected team and incorporated both new and
current members as well as retiring members.

Present: Jecel Mattos de Assumpção Jr, Ken Causey, Bert Freudenberg,
Craig Latta, Yoshiki Ohshima, Andreas Raab, Igor Stasenko

Absent: Giovanni Corriga, Edgar J. De Cleene, Randal Schwartz

The agenda for this meeting can be found at

http://squeakboard.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/agenda-for-mar-19-2009/

At the beginning of the meeting we focused on transitioning duties
from retiring members to continuing members and member jobs in general.
Ken will take over the duties of Secretary and Overall Mailing List
Administrator.  Craig will continue as Treasurer.  Andreas will take
over from Yoshiki as team advisor to the Elections team.  Randal will
continue to communicate with the Software Freedom Conservancy with
Craig's assistance.

The topic of the name of this team came up again.  It was noted that the
word 'Board' is firmly established in the community's mind.  A few
suggestions were made and we chose 'Squeak Oversight Board'.  Also we
will list ourselves on the Team list

http://www.squeak.org/Community/Teams/

to make it clear we are a Team like many others.  Igor will be working
with Janko Mivsek and the Webteam to make changes as appropriate on
www.squeak.org.

The issue of the status of the community teams came up but this was not
on the original meeting agenda and is a large topic so it was tabled and
to be discussed again in the future.  Craig noted that this is a regular
topic and should be added as a 'persistent' agenda item and discussion
should be expected in nearly every meeting.

We discussed the SFC, 4.0 relicensing, and the 3.11 release status but
Randal has been the point man on these issues and was unable to attend
so we lacked some information regarding current status, some of the
other members had bits and pieces of information however.  Discussion
turned to how we can measure success and progress of projects.

Jecel pointed out that it is relatively easy with the relicensing/4.0
project as you can state completion as:  'Compatible with Squeak 3.10
but with all methods not licensed under either MIT or Apache removed or
replaced.'  It was agreed that this was a very good measure but there is
still some discussion going on with SFC regarding the identification of
the license which covers a method.  Also where do we draw the line on
compatible if it turns out that large parts of the code need to be
fixed?  Should we consider releasing a possibly incomplete or broken 4.0
with the goal of releasing a 4.0.1 quickly with issues fixed?  Projects
need to have goals that can be reached in relatively short time periods.
For now since discussions continue with SFC it was decided to aim for a
completely compatible release but consider the possibility of something
else later if necessary, in general aiming for a relatively quick
release.

There was then discussion of the 3.11 release and how one would measure
progress and success with this project.  It was generally agreed that
this was less clear and that Andreas would talk to Randal, Matthew, and
Keith and get back to us at the next meeting with more information to
discuss this more clearly.

How does this team lead?  We discussed the job of this team overall.  It
was noted that in the past the team has tended to take more of an
observation and arbitration role.  After discussion we agreed that the
team needs to take a more active and leading role in the community.  

Part of this will be adding more outreach and communication.  We as a
team need to become more visible.  The idea of a blog was mentioned
where we would all post entries and where we would organize things
better than on a mailing list.  Andreas volunteered to look into setting
this up.  For the immediate future, once the blog is available, we will
continue to post to squeak-dev but if appropriate we should also post to
the blog.  This serves 2 goals:  1. We can organize things more
affectively on a blog and have permanent pages that can be easy to find.
2.  This serves the outreach goal by making our discussions and issues
more visible to the greater community that does not follow squeak-dev
regularly, if at all.  Expect more information on our team blog soon.

We then turned our attention to financial issues.  It was noted that one
of our bigger funding sources is the Google Summer of Code project where
the project mentors have been donating their earnings to the community.
For 2007 this was $2000 and for 2008 $2500, $500 per mentors.
Unfortunately Google paired down the project somewhat this year and we
were rejected as they want to focus on larger groups.  Giovanni
continues to hold the funds from 2007 and 2008 and Craig will be talking
to him about that and to Tim and ESUG regarding the current badge sales.
Currently the funds to which we have direct control originated from ESUG
as donations.  Or only unavoidable expense right now is the community
server which is about $50 per month and the available funds will
continue to cover that for the foreseeable future.

We realized that we had spent over an hour and still had plenty to
discuss so it was decided that we would schedule another meeting for the
following Thursday, March 26th 2009.  Remaining agenda items that need
further discussion include: Mission statement for 2009 (aka: Where is
Squeak headed), Financial needs for 2009, Community outreach (blog etc),
Positioning towards other communities, Process improvements (BPPs,
decision making etc), and we will of course be revisiting many of the
other issues mentioned above.

If you have anything you think we should discuss please let us know.

Ken Causey

Le 22/03/09, Ken Causey <[hidden email]> écrivait :

>http://squeakboard.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/agenda-for-mar
-19-2009/


Just let you know that I consider this as  a realy interesting
report.

Thanks you

On Sun, 2009-03-22 at 17:55 -0400, Raymond Asselin wrote: Thank you very much Raymond.

This report can now be found at

http://squeakboard.wordpress.com/

Everyone should feel free to add comments there as desired.

Ken

On 2009-03-22 22:18, Ken Causey wrote:
> The topic of the name of this team came up again.  It was noted that the
> word 'Board' is firmly established in the community's mind.  A few
> suggestions were made and we chose 'Squeak Oversight Board'.

SOB ;-)'


Karl

On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 18:05 +0100, Karl Ramberg wrote:
> On 2009-03-22 22:18, Ken Causey wrote:
> > The topic of the name of this team came up again.  It was noted that the
> > word 'Board' is firmly established in the community's mind.  A few
> > suggestions were made and we chose 'Squeak Oversight Board'.
>
> SOB ;-)'
>
>
> Karl

HA!  Seems fitting to me. ;)

Ken

On 23.03.2009, at 18:51, Ken Causey wrote:

To give proper credit we got the idea from the SLOBs:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Governance

- Bert -