OGB: constitution

Work in the OpenSolaris project is done under a constitution, which lays out how the community is structured.

Sort of, anyway. The constitution covers both the Governing Board and Community Groups, but in fact most of the activity around OpenSolaris takes place in User Groups (where people get together) and Projects (where code is written), and also in Communities of Interest (where technologies get discussed). None of these last 3 parts of the organization are defined by the constitution.

Indeed, they are hardly mentioned. Even though community groups are tasked by the constitution to initiate and manage projects to achieve their objectives, it isn't clear (because projects aren't defined) whether the projects established by a Community Group are the same as the Projects hosted on OpenSolaris.org, or whether project is used in the generic sense.

As for user groups, they are managed as projects. While I believe this to be correct in the sense that they can reuse the machinery and infrastructure, they should explicitly be called User Groups and given their own place in OpenSolaris as first class citizens.

And then we have Communities. Originally, when OpenSolaris came about, a bunch of communities were created. And these were Communities of Interest - focussed around a general technical area (for example, performance), or a specific technology (dtrace). Then the constitution came along, and created the notion of Community Groups. As part of the bootstrapping process, many of the original Communities became Community Groups, while some did not. The whole thing is a total mess, and part of that mess is overloading the notion of a community to mean two different - and often incompatible - things. I think we need to find a way to clearly separate the mechanism of governance from the day to day interactions of users in the community.

And then there's the amount of effort wasted by the current structures. Creating a project means you have to persuade a community group to authorise it (and not all communities can, remember, and of those that can persuading the machinery to work at all and getting the approval can be a painful and time-wasting process). Creating a community involves redefining the governance hierarchy and invites considerable debate.

Where to go from here, then? I think we need to call out the existence and standing of projects and user groups in the constitution; we need to make the creation of those parts of the structure be lightweight and effortless, so that anyone can just do it; we need to have a structure whereby projects and user groups are monitored and helped (sponsored, if you like); we need to revert communities to be communities of interest (which can then be created as required with no effort) and build a new governance infrastructure that just gets out of the way and lets people work on bettering OpenSolaris as fast as they're able to without putting roadblocks in their way.