[aclug-L] Re: volunteers

[Jonathan Hall <jonhall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

These are some good ideas.  I'll add a few of my own comments below.


On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 02:57:22PM -0600, Tom Hull wrote:
> 
> Some thoughts in the wake of last night's meeting:
> 
>  1) There was some (I think inconclusive, although maybe I'm just
>     hoping) discussion about organizational structure, membership,
>     voting, etc. Someone needs to formalize some sort of proposal.
>     (Let's face it, "Dictator for Life" doesn't cut it.)
> 
>     My own proto-proposal is simply that the "committee" should
>     be thrown open to anyone who wants actively participate in
>     it, and that "committee" discussions should be public. First

This sounds good in theory... but we still need some sort of criteria to
determine who actually is and is not a member of the committee.  (One member
comes to mind who has on numberous occasions volunteered to help, but then
never did any work... and even went so far as to say the group sucks later!)

This person was, for a while, on the committee mailling list (immediately
after its conception) until it was realized that he was not helping at all,
so we removed him from the list.

There are also opccasional "sensative" topics that need to be discussed by
the committee, and if such discussions are completely open, it's hard to
discuss such matters.

>     one attempts to achieve consensus; only failing that do we
>     fall back on voting (which raises the who-gets-to-vote issue).

It should also be noted that reaching a consensus without a clear idea of
"who gets to vote" (or "who gets to contirbute to the consensus") can be
tricky without a formal membership.  As an example, prior to this week, the
"consensus" on the list seemed to be that meetings were often worthless and
possibly not worth having any more.  After last night's meeting, the
consensus seemed to be more along the lines of "Lets all work together to
make the group work"

Hopefully in most cases, any issue that needs to be decied (whterh by
consensus or vote) will have an obvious majority opinion.  But I still think
there is value to having an actual vote.  A couple obvious reasons:  1) The
vocal minority won't rule the group.  2) You can't later get someone who
says "I don't like it this way, and I never had a chance to vote!"

In a nutshell, I guess we're trying to determine our own form of government. 
When Goerzen was here, we had a dictatorship, essentialloy, which worked
well... Dictatorship is always the most EFFICIENT form of government.  And
when John was here, he had the time, knowledge, and common-sense to be able
to govern that way.  I don't think there's anyone in the group currently who
would make a good dictator, though, if only because of a lack of time.

Alto, the group has grown significantly (and occasionally shrunk again)
since he left, so the job of dictator takes significanlty more time than it
did when he was here.

Furthermore, if the enthusiasm exhibited last night is to be properly
channeled into something productive, we will have a lot more going on than
any single person can take care of.

For these and other reasons, a dictatorship is simply no longer possible.

When John left, we tried to mimic what he had going by having several people
take over his job... "Dictatorship by committee" perhaps.  This has failed
for a number of reasons, too:  1) The actual job of dictatorship fell to a
small number of people who, for whatever reason, actually did the work.  2)
Others in the group felt the dictatorship was not run well.  3) others, who
maybe weren't upset, just lost interest for whatever reason.

This is sort of where we stand now.  We know two government forms that do
not work. :)

Now we're left trying to decide what to do... what I think I hear several
people suggesting is a sort of communism-falling-back-on-democracy approach. 
Maybe that will work... but I suspect that as the group grows (and I believe
it will, if we get through this time of negotiations), communism will become
less and less feasable, and we'll end up in more gridlock and/or people
making arbitrary decisions that not everyone appreciates.  (Which is pretty
well where we are now)

What I propose is a loose democracy.  I think all decisions should be voted
on, even if a consensus is apparant, a vote should formalize the decision. 
Any other decision making process I think will have to be rethought within a
year or two, and such a rethinking would probably come about as another
'crisis' like we're in now.  There's no reason to set ourselves up for
failure in the future.  We need to realize that what works now may not work
(and probably will not work) in the near future.


>     I also think there are at least three clear-cut roles that
>     need to be filled:
> 
>      a) Someone to deal with high-level organizational matters.
> 
>      b) Someone to plan and run the meetings, events, etc.
> 
>      c) Someone to build and direct the website.
> 
>     These could, of course, be multiple people in each case;
>     some people could take on multiple roles.
> 
>  2) The role I am interested in is building the software and
>     directing the content for the website. (I hope that someone
>     else can deal with the basic issues of hosting and sysadmin
>     the website.) The approach I favor (and I'll write up more
>     on this later) is to use a mix of existing and custom (new)
>     software; the latter would be a proper software bazaar
>     project; most of the content would be collected from users.
>     My favorite software for this sort of website is OpenACS:
> 
>       http://www.openacs.org/
> 
>     OpenACS software tracks community members (log in, get a
>     cookie); provides extensive support for community interests
>     (news, forums, faq-builder, polls/surveys, classified ads,
>     member pages); has flexible admin options; has support for
>     programmed tutorials (it can step you through a tutorial,
>     administer quizzes, and since it tracks members, keep your
>     place across sessions; it can make suggestions based on
>     what you've seen). OTOH, it needs some work to clean up,
>     apply a nifty design, and hack in new features, and content
>     like the FAQs needs human editing.

The existing site uses Zope, which is much like OpenACS in many ways.  I
believe Zope is actually a much more feature-rich application than OpenACS,
although OpenACS is probably more 'mature'.  Unless there's a good reason to
switch to OpenACS, I suspect Zope is the better way to go... simply because
we have a server on an OC-3 already running zope :)

There was some dicusssion on the committee list about moving the server back
to Kansas, and some suggested leaving it on the OC-3 is best.  I'm still not
entirely convinced, though.

I think if we have people willing and able to work on the software, we sorta
need the server where they can use it... Perhaps we can get a good
colocation deal from a local ISP?  Maybe iWichita, Websurf, Datility? 
Something that would give us enough bandwidht, but also local access if/when
necessary?


>  3) I'd like to suggest that next Monday's meeting split into
>     two groups (after some preliminaries), one for meetings and
>     the other for website. (Website was largely ignored at last
>     night's meeting.)

That's not a bad idea.  Perhaps we should form two sub-committees... one in
charge of online content, one in charge of meetings.  Perhaps even a 3rd in
charge of "extra" events (such as the Saturday sale, install fests, etc)

Then perhaps each of thse groups could meet (either at Monday's meeting, or
between Monday and the following meeting) and come up with proposals for how
to handle that particular aspect of the group, then we can come together
again and yay or nay their proposals.  Once all three group's proposals are
approved, we have a new group.

And as I think about this, I realize perhaps a 4th "general" group would be
needed, as well... one to perhaps come up with a constitution, by-laws,
etc... to propose a govorning body/method to the group.

There are a lot of details in all 4 of those areas taht need to be hashed
out, but as I hear you suggesting, Tom, it's probably not the most efficient
use of our time to hash them all out as a single group.

Any other comments on a proposal to break down ACLUG's activities into 2-4
groups for small-group discussion, followed by a presentation and any
applicable large-group discussion, then a vote to accept or reject the
propposals?


>  4) The other point that bears repeating is that right now it
>     is exceptionally important to show up at Monday's meeting,

I'll underscore this comment!  While it may be true that we want to hear
everyone's input... as Ryan Hunt pointed out, if you don't attend the
meetings, you don't know 25% of what's going on with ACLUG.

If you cannot make it to Monday's meeting, but want to be considered an
active member, I would encourage you to contact me, Dale, or John Alexander
by e-mail, so we can add you to our new upcoming "aclug-local" mailing
list--a list that will be used for business-related discussion primarily,
and will be open only to "active" ACLUG members (How "active members" is
defined remains to be determined)


--
"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The
literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." -- Spencer
Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It"
Notepads.
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