OGB 2009 Presentations

OGB Annual Report 2009-2010 term

Part 1: OGB Townhall at CommunityOne West, June 1st

 Join us for an OpenSolaris Governing Board Townhall at C1 in San Francisco on June 1st, 2009! We'll meet in Moscone ESP305 at 6pm.

Agenda

• Welcome & Introductions
• Open Q & A
  • OGB Suggestion Wall
  • Constitution and Charter
  • Reports from Communities, Projects & User Groups

OGB 2009 Key Actions; First Quarter of Term

• Established OGB chair, vice chair and secretary
• Reviewed and updated the current OGB policies
• Established new core contributor voting education policy
• Established facilitator project and mailing list
• Made core contrib email list active
• Determined that constitutional preamble and exec summary needed
• Mapped out charter, preamble, exec summary and constitution on wiki for review and update
• Awarded OGB contributor status to new contributors and facilitators
• Updated core contributor grants
• Determined that voting process needs to be easier
• Established OGB suggestion box wiki
• Reviewed and took action on initial suggestions
• Established OGB calender
• Switched to weekly OGB meetings
• Setup face to face meeting at CommunityOne
• Presented at OpenSolaris only townhall and LOSUG
• Reviewed and closed current OGB bugs
• Established community reporting mechanism for C1
• Helped promote several OpenSolaris events
• Held meeting with Sun liaison, Vincent Murphy

Outreach Status

We've made a great deal of progress on outreach in the first two months. The OGB met with Sun's executive liaison, Vincent Murphy, over lunch at CommunityOne West and we had lively discussion about the future, why IPS, and modernization. OpenSolaris technical lead, David Comay also joined us to answer questions and to get to know the board. That evening, we held a Townhall that Vincent also attended along with a relatively small group of interested community members.
Four members of the OGB also attended an all-day event for OpenSolaris User Group Leaders where we met people in our community from around the world, most of them long-term core contributors and enthusiasts. We learned a great deal, answered their questions related to why OGB, why IPS, and leadership. We all went to dinner together and made new connections across the globe that have resulted in new folks joining our regular OGB meetings to make their voices heard. Finally, many of us went to OSCON this week to work the OpenSolaris booth, lead BoFs, and give presentations.

Planning Status

We completed the groundwork for election planning with a team of 30 facilitators on facilitation-discuss. This effort is bearing fruit already through light-weight education about contributor grants, voting, and the basics of community group facilitation for OpenSolaris. The project provides a team for communicating election information and schedules out to the wider community for the first time.

OGB members also provided planning input for the OpenSolaris Developer Summit by completing the recent survey about possible dates for the annual 3-day event. OGB Vice-Chair, Peter Tribble also continues to lead the community, project, and user group reporting effort he started in Q1 with plans for Q2 reports and beyond.

Implementation Status

On the implementation front, John Plocher is drafting a constitutional executive summary and preamble to clarify the benefits of the new constitution draft and to provide a vision of our community purpose. We've also drafted a new version of information about How to Start a Project on OpenSolaris to make it easier to understand. Valerie Fenwick continues to lead implementation of the voter responsibilities policy toward increasing overall participation in the annual election.

Recognition Status

We recognized all existing community group facilitators and granted them OGB community contributor status this month. We also thanked them, the outgoing OGB, and those who supported the 2009 election in our Townhall slide presentation. Peter created a poster at CommunityOne, that was also displayed at the User Group Leader Bootcamp, to promote all those communities, project, and user groups who reported status to OGB in Q1. We've also made some progress on all OGB suggestion box requests we've received. So, I think we've made some progress on recognition, but have a long way to go on this item to really call it a success.

Change Management

We're starting to ramp up some new work to support the community through upcoming changes we see on the horizon.

We're learning and testing the new collective roles that implement the constitution and governance in the new opensolaris.org authentication application that is due to launch in August. We're also assessing the new user group and project roles that inform the future constitution so we can account for them in our updates to governance documents.

We've talked about the new focus for deliveries of OpenSolaris with new build tools and processes related to our conversations about IPS. And we've started to study the new content management system and improved collaboration tools that are planned for launch on opensolaris.org this fall.

There is a lot of positive change coming and some of it will be disruptive at first and require everyone to pitch in, so we're interested in how to help support the community through the change and how we can have a positive impact on areas that will concern our developer community.

OGB 2009 Key Actions; Second Quarter of Term

• Met with OpenSolaris Community Care and Feeding sponsor, Lynn Rohrer.
• Met with OpenSolaris Developer Collaboration Team
• Drafted 2010 election calendar and Constitution update schedule
• Resolved disconnet between Charter and new Constituion and drafted Preamble
• Updated Contributor and Core Contributor grants for 11 community groups

Outreach Status

We made more progress on outreach during our second quarter as a board, but the focus of our efforts was on outreach to groups within Sun on behalf of the OpenSolaris Community.

This quarter we invited Lynn Rohrer to join an OGB meeting and talk with us about the statistics her group generates for the OpenSolaris project that cut across communities, projects, and user groups. The data provided a picture of the activities that are tracked to measure health of the project and a view of the most active and least active areas in OpenSolaris as measured by mail and web page traffic. Lynn's presentation validated many of our assumptions about areas that need revitalization. The data also informed our work to assess all community groups, check contributor and core contributor records for community groups, and outreach to any groups with fewer than three core contributors in an effort to cleanup communities that are inactive and reinvigorate communities that wish to continue. Thanks to Peter Tribble for driving this effort and managing all communications.

The Developer Collaboration team responsible for the opensolaris.org web site infrastructure also joined an OGB meeting this quarter to discuss the roles and privileges implemented in the new opensolaris.org user authentication application. We agreed to minor changes to the role names in order to separate governance roles from web site roles which the Developer Collaboration team implemented last month. We also requested changes to the new application to enable the OGB Secretary to continue to manage grants on behalf of the entire community. We'd like to formally thank the Developer Collaboration team for making these late changes to the database and all the work required to re-migrate data so that we can continue on a path that separates governance roles from the web site roles and to support the current responsibilities of the OGB Secretary. Thanks also to Jim Walker for driving this review of the new authentication application.

Planning Status

We drafted and iterated on the 2010 election calendar this quarter and developed a schedule for our work on the draft Constitution. These two plans will take us through the final six months of our OGB term.

Implementation Status

We've implemented comments on the draft Constitution that were received just before the election last year and sorted out the disconnect between the Charter and Constitution to our satisfaction. We have added a Preamble to the draft that reinforces our commitment to open source and continue work on an executive summary that outlines the benefits of the new document. We are currently on schedule to meet our goal for stabilizing the draft and starting to communicate widely about the benefits of the document next week. Many thanks to John Plocher for driving this work, managing the details and making updates to the draft.

We are currently under moratorium for creation of new projects and communities on the web site until the Developer Collaboration team completes implementation and migration of the new XWiki infrastructure for opensolaris.org. But, we still intend to complete the work on the How to Start a Project on OpenSolaris document to replace project_instantiation.txt and publish the document after the transition to XWiki is complete.

We also continue to work on completing the Active Facilitators table and replace community group facilitators as people change roles. We'll begin regular communication to facilitation-discuss in November to provide key dates for election voting preparations.

Recognition Status

Sponsorship of the Facilitation project has helped to increase awareness around maintenance of contributor and core contributor records for community groups along with the outreach work to revitalize and cleanup community groups. So, we've seen a number of communities updating their contributor grants throughout this quarter and we hope to see that trend continue through the end of the calendar year, to prevent the rush of updated grants we saw just before last year's election. Thanks to Deirdre Straughan and the associated community group facilitators for their work to update grants for the OGB, Storage, Documentation, HA-Clusters, Device Drivers, Crossbow, LDoms, Sysadmin, Advocacy, HPC, and Printing community groups in the first half of the 2009 OGB term. This work puts us in a great position to get the remaining community group core contributor rolls updated by the end of the calendar year, so we can use our time in January to promote the nomination of new OGB members and the coming March election. 

OGB 2009 Key Actions; Final Half of Term

• Executed wide public reviews of Constitution draft
• Updated Lifecycle Process documents that augment Constitution and reviewed 
• Created In Memoriam web page for community
• Recognized OpenSolaris Developer Collaboration Team for work on authentication application and roles
• Attended OpenSolaris Developer Conference
• Drafted front page feature for 2010 OGB election
• Contacted Oracle Independent User Group leaders to talk about meeting
• Met with Sun liaison to have open Q&A session and published detailed minutes