[haiku-inc] Re: Pausing my donations
- From: Urias McCullough <umccullough@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Public Haiku-inc List <haiku-inc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2016 12:23:46 -0700
On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 1:21 AM, Humdinger <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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.
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
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