October 17 2016 4:42 PM, "Jessica Hamilton" wrote:
On Sun, 16 Oct 2016 8:23 am Urias McCullough wrote:
On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 1:21 AM, Humdinger wrote:Thanks for your replies so
far.
There are two topics here that shouldn't be mixed up: The Haiku Inc.
organisation and the way of the Haiku project.
I understand that the stagnating Haiku project is - besides real life
issues needing time - the reason for the decreasing motivation of the
Inc. members. Alex talked more about the problems of the project he
sees than those of the Inc. They are motivationally connected, but
let's concentrate on the Inc. on this mailing list. Just so much: as
enduser I don't feel Haiku is left in the dust by the other OS.
Besides mostly annoying changes in the GUI, I don't see fundamental
improvements there... They do have ever better apps, though. Mostly.
Agreed - the Inc. issues are only tangentially related to the Haiku project in
general...
However, as an Inc. member I can say that I have very much decreased my
attention to Haiku, Inc. duties as a result of how the larger project has (in
my opinion) stagnated over the last few years. This isn't necessarily a valid
excuse, but rather an explanation.
As for me personally, I'm probably a bad choice to be a member of Haiku, Inc.
at this point. My available time has steadily decreased over the years, and at
this point, I'm barely even keeping up with emails I receive. I don't have the
time/motivation to idle in the IRC channel(s), and I barely have the
time/motivation to respond to email threads like this.
At one point, I was trying to keep up with the infrastructure maintenance, but
I am struggling to do that as well. The gaps in Haiku, Inc. have become too
large for me to fill in with my occasional help and assistance.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how to "step down" without electing a
replacement body to take my place. Simply resigning would be pointless without
a replacement to take my place.
With Sean looking to perhaps step up, I am also interested in putting myself
forward.
I think if the two of us joined, then I think we may even have enough voting
power to start looking into evaluating and enabling some of the changes you
bring to the fore.
Ryan mentioned bringing more members into the Inc. which may be a good
idea, if there is interest in that out there. It's not just that we
need any people with enough time to cast a vote when it comes to deal
with a contract. But people who can evaluate a proposal and judge the
progress of the work etc. and have the time to do so. Those are hard
to find.
Maybe, if another applicant for a contract comes forth, it would
already help to ask for input about the applicant's plans on the dev
mailing list. People that don't want to burden themselves with a fixed
membership at the Inc. may be able to help evaluating a proposal, and
even monitor its progress etc.
I have often tried to recruit people into stepping up their involvement and
taking on non-development, non-website duties... unfortunately there seems to
be a series of common hurdles that prevent people from stepping up. Either they
don't feel they can devote the time (who can?), or they don't want to do stuff
that is boring.
I think there are three major issues that Haiku, Inc. suffers from when
attempting to locate new recruits:
1) Lack of interest
2) Lack of trust
3) Lack of experience
#1 is the usual problem. I think a large majority of people who are qualified
to run Haiku, Inc. are simply uninterested. Either because they don't feel they
can do the job effectively, they don't have any time, or they simply don't want
to do it. Some of this is lack of incentives - if we paid people to do the
work, I suspect we'd have far more interest. I personally don't know that we
can/should pay people to run Haiku, Inc., but it may become necessary to keep
it alive in the future. There are umbrella organizations we could potentially
turn to in order to manage everything for Haiku, Inc. such as the Software
Freedom Conservancy, but they will take a cut of donations.
#2 is ... difficult to deal with. Haiku, Inc. members generally have access to
the "keys of the kingdom" - they have the ability to affect the Haiku project's
infrastructure, and decide how funds are used. They are also assumed to "speak"
for the project (this isn't necessarily true, but that's what people assume).
As such, we tend to want people who have been around for a long time, are
trusted by the majority of the community, and who are not going to drive wedges
into the project. I think we have avoided nominating some very very good people
as a result of the latter concern. Has that been best for the project? I don't
know.
#3 is less of a hurdle than the first two items, but I suspect #2 could even be
overlooked if the person was extremely qualified for the work. For example, if
someone outside the project with experience doing accounting for non-profit
organizations was interested in helping out - I can't see how we could turn
down such an offer. I don't expect many highly-experienced volunteers to come
forward on their own, however.
I think the logical conclusion for me is to "force" Haiku Project contributors
to be more involved in managing Haiku, Inc. and voting for board members... but
that will require a complete rewrite of bylaws and setting up a process to deal
with this. That way all project contributors (those who have commit access,
website administration privileges, etc.) can decide how the project's funding
should be handled, and who should be handling it.
How do we get there from here? Who will be the one to do it? Also, I could be
completely wrong, and that's fine.
- Urias
I'll see if I can organize a BoD meeting (it's been a little over a year since
we had one). I'll send out the times / dates.
-- Alex
