Update On the Proposed Leadership Structure Changes

[zanderp]

Thread for discussion of blog post 'Update On the Proposed Leadership Structure Changes' - http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leade ... anges.html

[PhilTaylor-Prazgod]

"The Structural Team."

Representatives from OSM: Sarah Watz, Ronni K. Gothard Christiansen, Marijke Stuivenberg
Representatives from PLT: David Hurley, Javier Gómez, Chris Davenport
Representatives from CLT: Sander Potjer, Alice Grevet, Peter Bui

Is this list still complete and correct? If not please can you list the currnet names of the members of this team?

Thanks
Phil.

[agrevet]

Phil, that is correct.

Best regards,
Alice

[Beat]

Thanks for the update. :-)

Quick feedback on the summit part:

1. Transparency: "The Structural Team understands that members of the community would appreciate having access to leadership discussions during this summit." Great!

2. Obscurity / Leadership: "strong concern that some would not feel comfortable freely expressing themselves if the sessions were live streamed or recorded, and that it would hinder their ability to participate." The big question here is Why? True Leaders have no issues in communicating publicly. As we have such Leaders, I'm wondering what reasons are left to not feel confortable ?

3. Lack of transparency: "So streaming or recorded meetings will not be offered.": That's just too bad.

4. "Information from these meetings will be shared in a blog following the summit." : Reads as "PRs will be done later."

An open two-ways communication would be great and help build continuous Trust, Empowerment and Community.

Proposal for your Leadership meeting:

1. Do like parlaments do: Debates are public, sub-commissions and coffee-room discussions are private.

2. Stream debate sessions, and have a projector beaming a public text-return channel (e.g. twitter specific hashtag live feed)


-----

Quick feedback for the other parts, that should also be discussed during the summit:

1. The issue is not structure imho.

2. The issue is how (potential) small and large contributors are welcomed.

3. The issue is that we need to get an inspiring and challenging Vision of where Joomla wants to go, beyond the regular updates and current roadmap. Joomla is already more than a CMS, and to a broader audience than any other web system.

Outside of blogging systems, it is since years the most popular open-source web-sofware!

Imho, we need a forward-looking Vision and a Stratgey, and those should be discussed completely publicly from the start.

E.g. Questions like:
a. Where does Joomla want to go in the long-term (>5 years in Internet-architectures) ?
b. What is the next thrilling very major milestone goal for Joomla, that is capable of making Community moving mountains to achieve ?
c. What are the next revolutionary (and evolutionary) steps for CMS and Blogging systems ?

Those are the kind of answers that could come out from a truly open and participative Leadership Summit.

Maybe someone who is not in a Leader position could animate such a debate ?

These were just a few ideas, more to come during such an open and public session ;-)

[dhuelsmann]

@Beat - Well said!

[leolam]

So streaming or recorded meetings will not be offered. Information from these meetings will be shared in a blog following the summit.

So you will be able to moderate the outcome of the sessions and share only what you want. You might consider that "occlusive leadership"

Maybe someone who is not in a Leader position could animate such a debate ?

You just did but when does ''Leadership'' listens?

So sad & @Beat +100

Leo

[Tonie]

A lot of things already have been mentioned in one context or another. The current proposal lacks a few things:

1. a document explaining the current issues, and the things that go well. That last might even be more important than the first.
2. the reason this particular structure is chosen
3. a description how the current issues will be solved, and how the things that are going well stay that way.

As for the proposal:

1. OSM should stay separate (mostly financial and IP)
2. This proposal puts an enormous amount of coordination on a small group of people. I've been in this situation when I was on the core team, and the project was smaller, don't underestimate the pressure this takes when a small group has all responsibility. How are you going to keep people from flaming out? What is the procedure when somebody drops off the charts?
3. People in leadership will be just that, leadership. With that mount of work, they will not have any time left to work on the production side. This is one thing I think is necessary for most people in a leadershipgroup. Otherwise there will be a huge disconnect between leadership and the rest of the community.

[masterchief]

Keep the changes as simple as possible, but no simpler.

A common thread I'm seeing is to reduce OSM's role to the bare minimum. This can be easily done by just inventing a third LT that rolls up whatever OSM is doing that is not financial or legal in nature.

However, I think the bigger problem is Joomla's lack of development capacity. There needs to be more talk about how to fix bugs more quickly, how to process contributions more effectively, how to plan and execute architectural changes that are necessary to catch up with several years of technology changes, how to stop loosing experienced developers to burnout.

The bottom line is the core CMS is too fat and heavy to maintain with the current level of contribution. If it was up to me I'd mothball the 3.x series and work on a leaner, meaner Joomla 4 (break a few things but include a "legacy-mode" like we did for 1.5) and take a leaf out of WordPress's book to implement new features as plugins (or extensions in Joomla's case) that aren't included in the core (try and sort out the idea of the community supporting key features as separate extensions). Also take a leaf out of Drupal's playbook and try to encourage more people to work together on the same feature, rather than a dozen different people making extensions that do the same thing a little different.

And for crying out loud, just allow templates to be listed on the JED (throw whatever dollars you have to at it to solve that). Anyone who has used WordPress lately will know what I'm saying.

I really think you are focusing on the wrong problem.

[Webdongle]

First and formost I am not pointing the finger at any individual. And if what I say grinds close to the bone of anyone reading this ... 'If the cap fits, then wear it'

imho the problems with the lack of fixing "bugs more quickly" has come about because of the attitude of some of the devs. New features are added before bugs in the latest features are fixed. The current release cycle and problems with updates/upgrades does not take into account the needs of the end user.

All that is symptomatic of the leadership structure and not the cause of this issue. The problem imho is that some of the Joomla contributors are 'Empire building' with office politics.

Brian's suggestion of reporting down not up is the best that I have seen put forward. It will (imho) prevent the 'Empire Building' and prevent too much power being in the control of too few people. The majority of the volunteers are interested in adding to all aspects of Joomla. But giving too much power to the hands of too few people would eventually leave the door open to the few that are 'Empire building' ... at the detriment of other users/contributors.

For those interested in hearing Brian' proposal made at the Session Structure presentation at Joomla World Conference 2014 ... it is about 28 mins into
http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/0/9/f/09fa585 ... 68ae62cd96

[Hils]

One of the most exciting parts of the restructure is to practice 'openness & transparency'. To that end:

(1)where are the discussions of the structure WG taking place? The 'structure WG slack discussions' apart from talk about transcripts, have died. (Marijke is doing excellent work on transcripts, translations etc).

(2) The slack archives were available but subsequently held back whilst 'leadership' discussed whether they should be made available or not - has this discussion taken place? The slack strategy has valuable discussions which have disappeared until released by Leadership - when will that be please?

(3) This thread : noting that the title is incorrect as it is the Joomla structure changes that are being discussed, not just leadership (corrected on blog post - thanks Sander).

Although there have been several considered posts in this thread, we have no participation/acknowledgement/discussion from the Structure WG apart from Alice confirming that the list of members of that group is correct. Is the Structure WG watching this thread? When are you holding your meeting/s? What is the deadline for receiving further alternative proposals?

Thanks from Hils

[astroboysoup]

You just did but when does ''Leadership'' listens?

I'm listening right now and I know a lot of others are as well.

For me this is the first time in about a month where I had a moment to stop and reflect.

[astroboysoup]

E.g. Questions like:
a. Where does Joomla want to go in the long-term (>5 years in Internet-architectures) ?
b. What is the next thrilling very major milestone goal for Joomla, that is capable of making Community moving mountains to achieve ?
c. What are the next revolutionary (and evolutionary) steps for CMS and Blogging systems ?

Those are the kind of answers that could come out from a truly open and participative Leadership Summit.

Nice response Beat. We still haven't spoken about that trademark issue

There are two things that I personally would love to see Joomla move into in regards to a future.

1) Accessibile publishing tool. Tool meeting ATAG and WCAG 2 AA requirements. I would LOVE to see that happen. Joomla being accessible to all people around the world removing the barriers of language, cost and disability. Kind of there with the language translations, and hopefully will be a step closer with joomla.com reducing the cost and then if the front end, backend, and code output is improved to take into account disability that I think we've kicked the barriers of accessibility to use Joomla. (of course then comes documentation, code documentation and examples and so much more... I guess the list goes on really)

2) Web services. We're doing so much work with integrating Joomla with third party system and I think its the future of the web. Being able to talk from one platform to another and vice versa. A beautiful RESTful API for Joomla would be the icing on the cake for me.

Happy 10th Birthday Joomla.

[Hils]

@astroyboysoup - could you explain how your reply relates to the Joomla re-Structure discussion? Is this the right thread? (good answer in the right place)

[astroboysoup]

@astroyboysoup - could you explain how your reply relates to the Joomla re-Structure discussion? Is this the right thread? (good answer in the right place)

Lol, it doesn't neither of them do. Still working my way through the posts. I find it time consuming following input one at a time. I'm probably as good as responding to forum threads as I am twitter ones.

[Hils]

Ha! no problem - we can wait for someone else on the Structure Team! You probably have jwc-lag !

[astroboysoup]

Keep the changes as simple as possible, but no simpler.

A common thread I'm seeing is to reduce OSM's role to the bare minimum. This can be easily done by just inventing a third LT that rolls up whatever OSM is doing that is not financial or legal in nature.

However, I think the bigger problem is Joomla's lack of development capacity. There needs to be more talk about how to fix bugs more quickly, how to process contributions more effectively, how to plan and execute architectural changes that are necessary to catch up with several years of technology changes, how to stop loosing experienced developers to burnout.

The bottom line is the core CMS is too fat and heavy to maintain with the current level of contribution. If it was up to me I'd mothball the 3.x series and work on a leaner, meaner Joomla 4 (break a few things but include a "legacy-mode" like we did for 1.5) and take a leaf out of WordPress's book to implement new features as plugins (or extensions in Joomla's case) that aren't included in the core (try and sort out the idea of the community supporting key features as separate extensions). Also take a leaf out of Drupal's playbook and try to encourage more people to work together on the same feature, rather than a dozen different people making extensions that do the same thing a little different.

And for crying out loud, just allow templates to be listed on the JED (throw whatever dollars you have to at it to solve that). Anyone who has used WordPress lately will know what I'm saying.

I really think you are focusing on the wrong problem.

As a WordPress and Drupal shop here as well Andrew I hear what you're saying. I think with the new JED being release any time now that is possible and far easier.

In regards to OSM being simplified, I think that can be a good thing and it is in my notes from a lot of people as feedback. So that one is in there!

Lastly with the burn out and knowledge retention, yeh thats a huge issue. I don't do anywhere near as much as some of the devs but I feel like I burn out as well. Something that I hope the structure and the recommendations from the community will help with. Not clear yet as to how or if it will work but something that needs to be addressed.

[astroboysoup]

Ha! no problem - we can wait for someone else on the Structure Team! You probably have jwc-lag !

Roughly takes me about 30-60 minutes to reply to a post.

Some obviously quicker.

I had the worse stomach pains and digestion issues over that trip. Since day one when I arrived I was feeling it. Tuesday I was vomiting but mainly because of sea sickness, the rest of the week until a day after I returned in Australia I couldn't hold down a meal or was running to the bath room every hour or so. It was a painful 35 hours back on that plane.

[astroboysoup]

Ok enough rambling talk

UPDATE from the Structure Working Group and Team

1) The teams are working on explaining to the community what the current issues are in the current leadership structure, history on how things are done now, and how things got to where they are now.

2) Another group is working on the transcripts of the Structure session at JWC and having that translated into multiple languages to release to the community. The recording has been floating around but we want the transcript and translation of the transcript as well as even I can't understand some parts of my own recording.

3) The working group is also gathering feedback from everyone's blog posts, this forum post, comments in the documents, proposal ideas and working through them all. I was absent for about a week when a lot of this started floating around. Most though have been collated by the working group.

4) Currently all of the conversations are happening in Slack but this isn't accessible to everyone and we're still trying to work out if we're going to move again from this or not. A lot of people don't even know what Slack is.

5) Some of the members of the Structure WG are concentrating on Joomla 3.4 roll out and they need to. So the rest of us are monitoring, listening and gathering all the feedback until they are ready to come back in to the discussion. We don't want to move forward too far without them. So we have to push timing a little back to take into account their volunteer time and availability.

Have I missed anything?

[FlashRebel]

Keep the changes as simple as possible, but no simpler.

A common thread I'm seeing is to reduce OSM's role to the bare minimum. This can be easily done by just inventing a third LT that rolls up whatever OSM is doing that is not financial or legal in nature.

However, I think the bigger problem is Joomla's lack of development capacity. There needs to be more talk about how to fix bugs more quickly, how to process contributions more effectively, how to plan and execute architectural changes that are necessary to catch up with several years of technology changes, how to stop loosing experienced developers to burnout.

The bottom line is the core CMS is too fat and heavy to maintain with the current level of contribution. If it was up to me I'd mothball the 3.x series and work on a leaner, meaner Joomla 4 (break a few things but include a "legacy-mode" like we did for 1.5) and take a leaf out of WordPress's book to implement new features as plugins (or extensions in Joomla's case) that aren't included in the core (try and sort out the idea of the community supporting key features as separate extensions). Also take a leaf out of Drupal's playbook and try to encourage more people to work together on the same feature, rather than a dozen different people making extensions that do the same thing a little different.

And for crying out loud, just allow templates to be listed on the JED (throw whatever dollars you have to at it to solve that). Anyone who has used WordPress lately will know what I'm saying.

I really think you are focusing on the wrong problem.

This can help Joomla to survive. If this will start now, no write it on roadmap and plans.
Normal community does not know how everything works behind, what are teams, leaderships .... anybody and anyhow is there, last months or years ... it fails. Change it or die

[Mojsplet]

I agree with masterchief and FlashRebel.
Since 3, Joomla is just a nightmare for devs and admins.
Where im working, all public organisations are moving from Joomla to WP or Drupal.

[astroboysoup]

I agree with masterchief and FlashRebel.
Since 3, Joomla is just a nightmare for devs and admins.
Where im working, all public organisations are moving from Joomla to WP or Drupal.

Would love to hear a little more about this so I can pass things on to the right people.

[Webdongle]

I agree with masterchief and FlashRebel.
Since 3, Joomla is just a nightmare for devs and admins.
Where im working, all public organisations are moving from Joomla to WP or Drupal.

Would love to hear a little more about this so I can pass things on to the right people.

But surely masterchief is "the right people" ? Is he not 'development lead' ?