[Framework-Team] Re: random thought: identify the components that lack owners

[Jon Stahl]

Heh. I seem to have opened up an interesting thread of conversation.  
Which, I suppose, was half of what I subconsciously intended. ;-)

I agree with Hanno that the current scope of the FWT is indeed limited.  
And it was not really fair of me to imply that the FWT should pick up 
the longer-term vision. 

And, like Martin, I think that one of the most powerful things about 
Plone is the fact that leadership is dispersed and the vision is 
emergent.  (Plone is democracy, as Paul says.)

However, I do think that the ambition and scope of Plone has increased a 
lot since 2.1 (that's a good thing), and that Hanno's observation that 
while the Plone community is growing, we're not getting as much "new 
blood" into the core team as we need to.

One of the symptoms of that is the fact that some of of key components 
lack committed long-term maintainers.  I think that's in part because we 
haven't done a great job of articulating where we need more hands, and 
how to get folks involved.

On the plus side, I think we have a really excellent and fast-growing 
pool of talent that is on the cusp of being able to make really great 
contributions to the core, but we don't have a good, systematic approach 
for bringing those folks in.

I don't think, however, that the choice is "status quo" or "top-down 
leadership."  I think we can create a little more structure within our 
loose-but-effective swarm that will help more leadership emerge 
organically, and also help us do a better job of articulating our 
medium-term vision.

I have a few (still pretty vague!) ideas about how we might be able to 
do that, but really what I think is that we need to talk about this a 
bit more, both in person in DC and online.   I think the FWT has a role 
to play in that, but neither should it be expected to carry the entire 
burden.  The first PSPS event back at Google in February was also the 
beginning of an experiment in that direction.

I'd love to see this conversation continue.  It is definitely not an 
insoluble problem.

Also, Chris Johnson and I are doing a workshop on "collaborative design 
processes" in which I think a lot of these ideas will float around... I 
heartily invite all of you to come join that session!

best,
jon