[openbeos] Re: Waltercon 07

Hi Michael,

Michael S wrote:
That is also what Koki excelled at. Koki's was really good at taking the raw progress and distilling it down into neat, appealing, and easy to understand, digestible chunks, and communicating with hardware manufactures, yet, for some strange reason the most quaified marketing person resigned. Problems people have can't be fixed if you don't articulate it. Who knows why Koki left? Was there were some problem with Haiku Inc, the developers, or did he not have the time ? If it's the former two, it can't be fixed unless he tells someone what the problems are.
I know this may sound selfish, but I just felt that I could not contribute to the Haiku project in a way that I considered meaningful and at the same time rewarding to me. There were multiple reasons for my decision, but if you asked me to give the more important one, I would have to say that it was the admin group environment. Being the single marketing person all surrounded by engineers made it too difficult for me to perform my role in a way that was satisfactory to me in terms of a time/effort burden that I was willing to bear.
I perhaps also expected a bit more leeway on marketing related issues from the admins than I perceived they were willing to give me. Admittedly, this may have been a misplaced expectation on my part. My failure to actually form a *true* team effort may have had a part on how things turned out. Had I been able to persuade others into contributing enough to the marketing efforts, I could have made the case to have more marketing contributors added to the admin group, therefore creating a bit more balance. There were several of what I would call occasional contributors, to whom I am very grateful, but never anyone regular enough that I could have proposed to become an admin. Not blaming anyone for anything; just stating the way it was.
Please, don't get me wrong: I am not saying the admins are evil. They are all great guys, and I am very grateful for their contributions. It's just not what I expected. I found it to be too informal for my idea of what the decision-making body for a project should be. For example, the admin meetings: they were very casual, and quite lacking in substance many times (IMHO; I am sure some will disagree). In general, attendance was also very low, and I also found it troublesome that while many discussions were started, very rarely decisions were reached.
IMHO, Haiku has grown to a point where it needs to graduate from the small project mentality if it wants go grow further. As it is now, I think the admin group is not suited to handle the broad range of issues that the project needs to address beyond development. This may actually be a good thing, as you really want the devs to stay focused on the code. But there needs to be something or somebody to make up for the current shortcomings of the admin group: IMO, that should be Haiku Inc.. Perhaps a good idea would be to repurpose the admin group to something like a "technical council" focused on development issues, and then have the rest handled by a beefed up Haiku Inc. BOD to include experts in various areas (legal, marketing, etc.) and a representation from the technical council and perhaps even the community. The BOD members have to have a well defined role, and some basic set of responsibilities to avoid the current situation where Michael ends up carrying all the load alone. Just some food for thought.
I hope Michael Phipps and the admins are gracious enough to take this message for what it is meant to be: constructive criticism.
Finally, as you can probably tell from my presence on this list and IRC, I still have the desire to contribute to Haiku, and I can actually make some time for it. But I just don't feel like doing it as an admin, at least not under the current conditions. So, just see me as another member of the Haiku community that just happens to be very active and involved. :) 

Cheers,

Koki

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