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Re: Infrastructure, was: Proposal: New web site maintainers



On Mon, 4 Oct 2010, Chris Travers wrote:

However there is also a  basic question to the community:

What can we do to facilitate cooperation and contribution from the community?

Bluntly, and hopefully without offense: Get out of the way.

I have a few basic ideas, still very poorly formed, but worth
discussing openly in the spirit of peer review:

1)  Would it be helpful to have a list for moderators of the web site?

I think not.

If the site managers need to communicate beyond simple email, they can sort it out among themselves. Why should you have to worry about that in the startup phase? Don't lay so much groundwork that they only have one path to follow, and you end up holding hands to the extent that nothing has changed.

Appoint a couple core people to run web issues, and then trust them to do what you've tasked them to do. If you don't like the result, advise them. If you still don't like it, fire them and find somebody else. But the "management by central committee" approach has not really worked to date, so why should a version of it with a few extra people work now?

That aside, a (protected) forum on the site itself for site issues seems like a more logical approach.

(Actual moderator status would, I think, need to be invite-only, but
it would give people a chance to get involved and show themselves
before we make such a decision.)

I think the way this is normally handled in community building sites, is to let people's behavior recommend themselves to the existing moderators. If the admins who observe them approve them, they are given greater authority--such as moderating a specific forum, moderating the whole site, editing info pages, etc..

You don't need to have an all or nothing structure here--from user to full admin at one shot. There are various levels of incremental promotion possible in drupal.

 > 2)  Would it be helpful to have a list for people interested and able
to contribute to the management of the infrastructure?  Actual ability

I don't think so, not right now anyway.
What infrastructure is there, other than git, the website and the lists? Of these, only one requires creative management at the current level of involvement.

I am a detail oriented person. I write bylaws and contracts for fun, and am usually all about structure. However, I think in this case, you are putting the cart before the horse, the driver, the passengers, and maybe even the road.

Start with a few initial full admins, tell them the results you want, and sit back to watch them do it. Keep the "core committee" out of it as much as possible. If you need to ask the user list what the desired result is first, then do that, but don't set up any new working groups, committees, development conferences, or try to describe the entire project from start to finish before it is even born. Let it grow with a minimum of initial restrictions.

I would withhold the power to create full admins, but allow the admins you appoint to delegate any lesser authority as they find necessary in daily operations.

Otherwise, you're just putting an abstraction layer between day to day operations and yourselves, that will still result in you having an alarming quantity of responsibility for the site.

Part of what I'm wondering is if it wouldn't be better to try to push
the role of the core committee closer to that of pure governance

Probably reasonable.

matters and try to open up some of the infrastructure management to a
wider community.  Maybe we could have other committees for managing
the web site and other pieces of infrastructure on a day-to-day level
and free us up a bit.

If it only frees you up "a bit", it has failed in its purpose. From where will you get the people to compose all of these committees? Some responsibilities (I.E. running low traffic lists, managing infrequently used repositories, etc.) are better done by one, or at most two, people anyway.

Honestly, there is not enough of an involved community, to support this level of bureaucracy. Maybe later such things will make sense, but this is a case when creating the structure for expansion before the thing that is going to expand, is going to make it too complicated to bother with.

One core committee member, and two or three non-core-committee members, with full administrative rights, and the core committee with control over the DNS settings, should be enough to maintain control over what those full admins do. Let the site promote in-house, with a structure it develops as fitting its needs as they evolve.

Maybe this is a bad idea or maybe it is a good one.  But I figured it
seems like a good time to float it and see what other people think.

It has elements of a good idea.:) Obviously the large structure centralized management model is not appealing to me in this case.

The core committee has tried hands on, and it hasn't worked. Instead of worrying about "how", shouldn't it be worrying about "what" and "who"?

That is: instead of worrying about how the site is managed on a day to day basis, how subordinate authority is delegated within the site structure, how often and by what means the site admins communicate internally, and so on; it should instead worry about what the ultimate goals of the site are; and who should be intrusted to build the team that reaches those goals.

Regards,

Luke
P.S.
A minor matter of terminology, while I'm ranting: why is it a core committee, and not a core team, as with many open source projects?