--------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: The following should be considered beta quality documentation. It represents my understanding of the rough consensus that came out of an irc meeting. Please feel free to point out mistakes, to clarify points, or suggest improvements. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- During our inaugural irc meeting last night, we talked about providing more of a leadership structure for koha to add some consistency, motivation, and vision to koha development. We talked about a couple of options, ranging from continued anarchy ("there's no leadership like no leadership") to an elected steering committee ("if a camel is a horse designed by committee ..."). In the end we settled on a happy medium ("The art of compromise is giving everyone some of what they want so that, in the end, no one is happy.") The purpose of this email is to explain the basic structure that we settled on as well as the roles and responsibilities of each position. We decided that we (the people on the development list) should elect a 'benevolent dictator' to serve us until he/she decides to pass along the baton to someone else (or looses the mandate of the development list). This person would nominate several key assistants to oversee specific areas of the koha project. This 'cabinet' should look something like this: Benevolent Dictator Release Leader Marketing Leader Recruiter Standards Liason Each of these positions is described below: Benevolent Dictator: This person is responsible for setting the overall tone of koha development. They will determine which Major features belong in a given release, which outside organizations we should focus on building relationships with, etc. Our dictator should be our visionary and strategic thinker. Release Leader: This person is chosen to oversee the development of a specific release. There may be more than one release leader concurrently (e.g., a 1.2 release leader and a 1.4 release leader), the one overseeing the tail end of development on an earlier release while the other is ramping up development on the next release. This person should be; making tactical decisions about merging or removing code, resolving conflicts, and managing a release schedule by encouraging (harassing?) developers. Marketing Leader: This person should be targeting specific organizations to approach about koha. They are not the sales arm of katipo or any other koha support/development company, instead they should be trying to increase awareness (and acceptance) of koha. Examples may be coordinating a presence at ALA regional meetings, collecting koha success stories for distribution on the devel list (and web site), and the like. Recruiter: This persons role is to find solid developers and designers to bring into the koha development and support effort. This should include international recruitment (esp. in markets determined to be important by the Marketing Leader and Benevolent Dictator). It may also include helping/mentoring likely candidates from the koha users list. Standards Liason: This person should help coordinate our standards compliance efforts. They will be tasked with gathering standards documentation and writing (or finding people to write) developer oriented documentation about the standards documentation. (An if you think that last sentence was evil, you should go read some standards documents.)