Ops meeting notes

Staffing

We have 2 interns lined up for this summer. Philippe will send out mail about that and go over at the staff meeting.

Volunteers on Chandler

Discussion of how to deal with volunteers that are funded by other organizations.

• Obviously we want this kind of help but we need to plan for how to manage such resources, and set clear expectations on how much hand-holding we can supply if that becomes necessary.
• How easy would it be for a fresh volunteer to ramp up and contribute to Chandler? Heikki thinks it is quite possible in some areas but not so easy in critical path work.
• We need a good list of projects for volunteers. There are different kinds of such projects: one kind is "learn and grow" projects for interns and similar volunteers. Another kind of project is something ambitious that requires specific knowledge but we can't plan for that kind of thing -- we need to only be prepared to take advantage of individuals who show up and throw something like that together. But there ought to be a third kind of project, on the path for 1.0 and also well-constructed for an individual to deal with.
• Also there are bugs people can tackle pretty immediately without much design input.

Mitch: We plan to become even more disciplined at doing only those things that are necessary to get to 1.0. The rest of the ecosystem is more than we can do quickly with our current resources, so it's great that we're getting interest from volunteers. It's strategic for us to be able to respond and use volunteers, so that in itself may need to be elevated to a project.

Other models? Google summer of code gets a list of projects, but other than that, leaves it to the team that suggested the project to figure out how to manage. Mozilla's SOC projects are all dead now, however -- after the students left, those projects did not move forward. OTOH, Apache SOC projects made it into the main code-base, and Python teams also found this to be a success.

Mitch: It's important to have realistic expectations. It's great to have people volunteer but there are many ways they can fail to make a lasting, integral contribution. It would be great to have one or two Chandler volunteer success cases at this point, even if modest.

Ted: If you look at Cosmo and Scooby, if those teams each got a full-time volunteer that would nearly double the size of the team.

Summary: This is Ted's project, and he'll work closely with others to engage these volunteers.

The Strategy Mailing List

Following up on discussions from last week. We will now kick off this list, as soon as we have a name. We could call this a core team, because we might use that list for things other than product strategy. Jared will set up 'osaf-core@lists.osafoundation.org'. The initial membership of this list will be everybody at OSAF though we expect in the long run not everybody will follow the mailing list by their own choice. Also, in the long run, we expect to have some process for including non-OSAF employees in the core team.

The existence of this list is not a secret, nor are the things it is working on in general. Core team will report on work to the rest of OSAF and externally when appropriate.

More business planning

Our leading hypothesis is that we're doing a leading-edge small-business collaboration solution. What are the business opportunities? Mitch is pursuing this investigation ardently with John Lilly and others, and will have updates.

If we go through this business planning and find an opportunity we like, then the big organizational challenge will be focus. We'll need to learn how to focus on just the things that are important for the business plan. Right now we don't focus because we don't have a narrow enough definition of what we're working toward.

This meeting/venue: Ops team

More engineering decisions are being made in the individual team meetings than before (e.g. Chandler decisions in Chandler engineering lead meeting). This team, Ops, will have more focus on organizational issues.

Staff meeting this week

Priscilla wants another week to prepare for talking about the Scooby plan, but the Cosmo Demo can happen this week. John will also talk about what's in Cosmo 0.3.

Demos from last few weeks have been cool and Mitch regrets having missed so many staff meetings recently, including this week which he'll also miss.

Wiki Changes

There have been a bunch of software changes to the Wiki and more are coming. The software updates were done by the IT Intern.

• Rename is still broken
• Jared will send an overview to general@osafoundation.org about what's been fixed so far
• Matt has made some style updates, the blocker for applying those is Jared who is focused on wiki bugs instead
• Problem reports should be made to support@kei.com

-- LisaDusseault - 04 Apr 2006