[Koha-devel] koha development leadership

[Pat Eyler]

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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.
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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.)