Hi Norbert, I can understand your concerns. It may look a bit like the announced board members take over without being based on the community. Of course there is no such intent and I think the processes should be transparent and the interests of the community should always be taken into account. Yet, we intentionally chose not to do a democratic setup because of the negative experience we made with Squeak and its SqueakFoundation. The democratic setup and a board that didn't actively steer the direction of development and make decisions paralyzed the community because of the too diverging interests. This situation eventually lead to the decision to start Pharo. Therefore, we really want to make sure that we do not do the same mistakes again. And this is exactly also why I think its important to instantiate a board as early as possible. If we wait until a lot of people have joined (and I can imagine that this will happen as there does not seem to be much progress in Squeak right now), the risk is that we again loose our focus. Just to give an example: even if people come to Pharo and use it for EToys, I still want to be able to remove it. You ask why Marcus and Mike? On the one hand, both bring a lot of experience from managing previous Squeak releases (3.8 and 3.9) and both have a deep know-how from being actively involved in Squeak for many years. On the other hand, with Mike we have another guy from industry, so we have a balance between academia and industry (although I'm also involved in research with my PhD, I consider myself as an industry guy because netstyle.ch/cmsbox is the main reason I'm pushing Pharo). Cheers, Adrian On Jul 17, 2008, at 10:05 , Norbert Hartl wrote:
Hi,
that is very very early for the installation of a "board". What are the topics only a board can do? I think at this stage of project existence it should be a goal to involve everyone participating as much as possible. And I doubt the installation of a board supports this. I think you first need a community that you want to "steer".
I have the impression we really should care about transparency. Announcing a board and a board "model" without any prior announcement or discussion is not very sensible to other people involved. I can live with this board but e.g. I want to know what/where put Marcus and Michael in charge? Both are rather absent from this list and Marcus is "recovering slowly". If there were any decisions that must have been made while meeting in personal or by private email. That's what I mean. Please correct me if I missed something important.
Maybe it is just whining from my site and not worth it. But I'm really sensible to such things and I (too) must organize very well where to spend my spare time.
Norbert
On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 09:30 +0200, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
Hello everybody
We are happy to announce a board for Pharo! So far, Pharo has mainly been "directed" by Stef who initiated the project. Now that the community grows and Pharo makes progress, the board will bring some more structure into the decision making process.
We don't have bylaws or any rules written down yet but the idea is to run it similar to the Apache board. That is, new board members are elected by existing board members. The rational is that we want to assure continuity to be able to steadily push Pharo forward.
The current board members are: - Marcus Denker - Stefane Ducasse - Adrian Lienhard - Michael Rueger
Stef
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