Re: Presenting groups

Hi Dave,

Thanks for participating this debate :)

>> Yes, this is just a proposal of "how we may work". The main idea is to
>> have small teams (from 2 to 6 persons?) working on a precise and
>> concrete topic.
>
> Nice idea, somewhat hard to implement in an Open Source project I suspect.

I think thats just a question of motivation and time. At PostgreSQLFr,
we are really few actually doing things, a bit more helping in some
special events or times. But with this motivation we can do things, and
we're not such a huge group.

My idea, with the small groups, is to do things fast. I'd prefer small
groups going fast and taking sometimes bad decisions and learning from
it, than a big group taking allways the best decision, but going slowly.

>> I imagine the "chief" to change each year. I imagine one person not be
>> chief of more than one unique group and some mechanism to force
>> elections when a "chief" is willing to give up or when he's gone or when
>> he doesn't do anything. :)
>>
>> Please understand I'd like to keep it simple, far from bureaucracy. But
>> this said, we cannot act without some kind of rules.
>
> Why not?

Because I want PG Eu to be an Open plant, where anyone can come in and
help, work and/or take responsabilities or let some others down. I think
some clear and simple rules can apply.

I keep in mind that we are all volunteers here, and that we will help PG
Eu projects as part-part-part-time occupations. The one giving some
hours to PG Eu per week may be already an important contributor :-)

OTOH, I don't want to write things in the marble. We'll modify the rules
if they aren't good enough.

I just proposed some kind of organisation and I appreciate your remarks,
I wish many more answer too, has we have a consensus to start real things.

> The main project seems to be working perfectly well. We get
> good software release, conferences and events are organised very
> successfully.

I don't think everything is organized there by the same people, right?

> The only groups we have other than -core and funds are
> ones where there is a distinct need for people we trust highly - eg.
> committers and sysadmins.

I don't think -core, committers or even sysadmins organised everything.
They surely do great job at coding matters, but without local groups,
there wouldn't be so many pgDays, PG Conferences and others events.

This community has to understand, IMHO, that we all need each other. PG
Eu is just an effort to help local groups and synchronize efforts as we
don't reinvent the wheel each time in each country.

So if you're suggesting that we all should work on everything at the
same time, I think pgsql-eu-general may be a big mess in a few.

I'm participating on a FOSS Association in france called APRIL (they're
close from FSF and FSF-Europe, etc). They work only with small groups
and this is working really better than some years ago when they tried to
do things all together.

I think cutting in small groups, with skilled persons for the domain is
way better than having everyone trolling on everything on every single
idea.

I don't say I don't want to see big debates. If any group or "group
leader/chief" has a problem, they may ask the list to get ideas or comments.

> Sometimes these some bike-shedding admittedly, but I think the freedom
> in the way we work more than makes up for that.

Don't make me say things I did not say. Everyone is free to help. I just
said we may need some "Internal Rules", as every group of human beings have.

The only rules I spoke about is about creating dedicated groups in some
fields and how a group is organized. Im affraid that if we don't decide
to have a "leader" in each group, we won't do things as fast as we could.

Thanks,

--
Jean-Paul Argudo
www.PostgreSQLFr.org
www.Dalibo.com