[tdf-discuss] OpenOffice.org Product Roadmap: made by whom ? was: Re: [discuss] remove of binfilter module

Hi Sam,
> Do you have a concrete proposal?
yes, I have.

First, I do not have any problems with the Apache style of decision
making, lazy consensus sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I like that
style. This fits perfectly to the "meritocracy" principle.

My understanding is, that this principle is based on
* contributing individuals
* organizations/institutions contributing developers and/or money for
the infrastructure/governance, these organizations contribute because
they have derived products or other business around the regarding software.
So users are represented in this model by own work power or indirectly
by companies.
This principle has been proven to work quite well for many open source
projects.

I think this principle may get enhanced by enabling a non profit
organization to have their own resources on a project (This might fit
into the Apache philosophy considering this organization as an
contributing institution). I think this is necessary because there is
already a lot of business happening around OpenOffice, but most of these
businesses are just to small or have not the right expertise to execute
on the "meritocracy" principle.
So what the OOo project missed most was to have a path to get product
feature or tasks done (or just 4th level support) with the help of money
offered.

So my proposal is continue project decisions the Apache Style but also
to find a framework to make product decisions in a manner that also the
concerns of Users, local communities, QA, business partners, etc. get
honored. This framework also should enable to collect money so that
development (committer) resources can be found to get the issues
addressed in an equitable process.

We already have thousands of feature requests and enhancements in the
queue, we are putting a new bunch of requirements on top of it through
the current transition to Apache, I think we should seek the power of
_all_ OOo communities, users and businesses to achieve significant
growth to make OOo a better and successful product. And I did not even
included wishes like ODF Viewers, mobile and Cloud services around OOo.

My offer is to develop (with all concerned parties) a new charter for
all the groups mentioned above (as a successor of the Community Council
Charter) and enable the project to have own development resources. The
non profit organization Team OpenOffice.org e.V. played in the past just
the role of being the cash box of the CC in a quite defensive way
(http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html, will you find the path
to donate ??), now Team OOo is preparing to offer a link between
business, communities, users and developers to enable growth on the new
futile ground we are now moving on.

Martin





-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted