that’s whacked

Why you should vote for me.

Monday, Mar 12. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

…. and if you don’t want to – at least scroll to the end to see who I think you should vote for.

Glynn recently asked “Why should I spend one of my 7 votes on you?”

Good question. You should vote for me because I give a shit. I think I have a proven track record of working to make all things OpenSolaris-related better. As I mentioned in my nomination thread, I’m on the OpenSolaris Engineering team, and have been involved in pretty much all aspects of the project. I’ve sponsored putbacks to ON. I’ve worked on the website. I’ve worked on the SCM bits. I’ve worked on the mailing lists. I’ve broken websites. I’ve fixed websites. I’ve even touched Jive (and washed my hands in acid afterwards). I’ve been paged at 3am when the site is down. I’ve broken the site at 3am, and then been paged.

Anyway, clearly I’m involved in the project – and I’d like to be involved more in the governance. I understand what needs to be done more transparently, what needs to be external, etc. but more importantly – given my work in the Tonic team, I understand how things can fit into our operational structure and how things would need to be implemented.

I’ve setup bugs.grommit.com (an external Bugzilla) and gave space for cr.grommit.com (external code review – though really, dp did all the hard work there).

You can read my response to the DTrace community’s OGB questions if you want some more specific answers to more specific questions.

What would be my priorities? Looking at the list of priorities from the recent poll, I would put my highest as:

• Deploy a public defect management system
• Deploy a public RTI system
• Reorganize the existing community/project organization

The first two are clearly needed before we can have a fully open development process. The first benefits both committers and viewers, whereas the second benefits only committers – hence why I list them in that order. The third is desperately needed… looking at our mess of communities and projects is clearly evidence of that. We need to cleanup grandfathered communities that should be projects, we need a clearer hierarchy of what should be a community and what should be a project, and I think we also need a stricter affiliation/endorsement (so that all projects are tied to a community).

It also looks like people are posting quick bios, so here’s mine: I did my BS & MS in Computer Science at UC San Diego, graduating in 2003. I joined the Solaris Kernel Test group, and worked there for a couple of years before joining the kernel development group as part of the OpenSolaris Engineering team. My biggest area of current expertise is probably in the SCM area, having been involved in the SCM infrastructure deployment and I’m currently leading the SCM Migration project in the effort to move ON from Teamware/SCCS to Mercurial.

…. and lastly. If you don’t want to vote for me, at least listen to who I think you should vote for.

• Keith Wesolowski – not only does he give a shit, he knows this shit. seriously, he helped write the draft for the constitution, and his thoughts on governance are hands down the most well thought out I’ve read.
• Michelle Olsen – it’s important to me that the OGB properly represents the non-technical aspects to the project. Docs are a key component, and Michelle has been heavily involved in the project.
• Glynn Foster – he brings the awesome. no seriously. plus he brings the experience of working with a large open source project’s foundation board
• Ben Rockwood – he’s one of the originals, he’s passionate about this stuff, and he’s always been heavily involved in all aspects of the project.