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The Squeak Leadership Team met on Thursday March 19th. This was the first meeting of the newly elected team and incorporated both new and current members as well as retiring members.
Present: Jecel Mattos de Assumpção Jr, Ken Causey, Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Yoshiki Ohshima, Andreas Raab, Igor Stasenko
Absent: Giovanni Corriga, Edgar J. De Cleene, Randal Schwartz
The agenda for this meeting can be found at
https://squeakboard.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/agenda-for-mar-19-2009/
At the beginning of the meeting we focused on transitioning duties from retiring members to continuing members and member jobs in general. Ken will take over the duties of Secretary and Overall Mailing List Administrator. Craig will continue as Treasurer. Andreas will take over from Yoshiki as team advisor to the Elections team. Randal will continue to communicate with the Software Freedom Conservancy with
Craig’s assistance.
The topic of the name of this team came up again. It was noted that the word ‘Board’ is firmly established in the community’s mind. A few suggestions were made and we chose ‘Squeak Oversight Board’. Also we will list ourselves on the Team list
http://www.squeak.org/Community/Teams/
to make it clear we are a Team like many others. Igor will be working with Janko Mivsek and the Webteam to make changes as appropriate on www.squeak.org.
The issue of the status of the community teams came up but this was not on the original meeting agenda and is a large topic so it was tabled and to be discussed again in the future. Craig noted that this is a regular topic and should be added as a ‘persistent’ agenda item and discussion should be expected in nearly every meeting.
We discussed the SFC, 4.0 relicensing, and the 3.11 release status but Randal has been the point man on these issues and was unable to attend so we lacked some information regarding current status, some of the other members had bits and pieces of information however. Discussion turned to how we can measure success and progress of projects.
Jecel pointed out that it is relatively easy with the relicensing/4.0 project as you can state completion as: ‘Compatible with Squeak 3.10 but with all methods not licensed under either MIT or Apache removed or replaced.’ It was agreed that this was a very good measure but there is still some discussion going on with SFC regarding the identification of the license which covers a method. Also where do we draw the line on compatible if it turns out that large parts of the code need to be fixed? Should we consider releasing a possibly incomplete or broken 4.0 with the goal of releasing a 4.0.1 quickly with issues fixed? Projects need to have goals that can be reached in relatively short time periods. For now since discussions continue with SFC it was decided to aim for a completely compatible release but consider the possibility of something else later if necessary, in general aiming for a relatively quick release.
There was then discussion of the 3.11 release and how one would measure progress and success with this project. It was generally agreed that this was less clear and that Andreas would talk to Randal, Matthew, and Keith and get back to us at the next meeting with more information to discuss this more clearly.
How does this team lead? We discussed the job of this team overall. It was noted that in the past the team has tended to take more of an observation and arbitration role. After discussion we agreed that the team needs to take a more active and leading role in the community.
Part of this will be adding more outreach and communication. We as a team need to become more visible. The idea of a blog was mentioned where we would all post entries and where we would organize things better than on a mailing list. Andreas volunteered to look into setting this up. For the immediate future, once the blog is available, we will continue to post to squeak-dev but if appropriate we should also post to the blog. This serves 2 goals: 1. We can organize things more affectively on a blog and have ermanent pages that can be easy to find. 2. This serves the outreach goal by making our discussions and issues more visible to the greater community that does not follow squeak-dev regularly, if at all. Expect more information on our team blog soon. (Of course you are reading this on the very blog referenced here.)
We then turned our attention to financial issues. It was noted that one of our bigger funding sources is the Google Summer of Code project where the project mentors have been donating their earnings to the community. For 2007 this was $2000 and for 2008 $2500, $500 per mentor. Unfortunately Google paired down the project somewhat this year and we were rejected as they want to focus on larger groups. Giovanni continues to hold the funds from 2007 and 2008 and Craig will be talking to him about that and to Tim and ESUG regarding the current badge sales. Currently the funds to which we have direct control originated from ESUG as donations. Our only unavoidable expense right now is the community server which is about $50 per month and the available funds will continue to cover that for the foreseeable future.
We realized that we had spent over an hour and still had plenty to discuss so it was decided that we would schedule another meeting for the following Thursday, March 26th 2009. Remaining agenda items that need further discussion include: Mission statement for 2009 (aka: Where is Squeak headed), Financial needs for 2009, Community outreach (blog etc), Positioning towards other communities, Process improvements (BPPs, decision making etc), and we will of course be revisiting many of the other issues mentioned above.
If you have anything you think we should discuss please let us know.
The Squeak Oversight Board Blog 