OpenNTF has had a
steady stream of contributions over recent years, adding to a large corpus
of contributions during this century. There is also renewed focus on Domino,
potential for new markets of JavaScript developers with Domino, imminent
new releases of Sametime, Connections in the process of being acquired
by HCL, and a number of other products already in ownership or being acquired
by HCL. The board have appreciated the need for revisiting project approaches
and management of key projects, to ensure greater scalability for the future,
reach beyond traditional project categories and ensure better consumption
of quality projects. After all, OpenNTF pre-dates YouTube (2005) and GitHub
(2008), as well as most currently-active ICS-related blogs.
But we want you,
our OpenNTF community, to be involved in building this future. We have
some ideas, but we want to form a Project Steering Committee to
review those ideas and come up with a formal proposal to the board. This
will touch all aspects of the contributor process and probably resurrect
or modernise existing roles like committers. The Project Steering Committee
is expected to evolve into product-specific committees, ensuring review
and overseeing of key projects for those products. But this inaugural committee
will have a different focus, on recommendations only, and there is no obligation
on your time beyond the adoption of the recommendations. However, this
is an opportunity to get involved at the earliest stage.
We would like
to move quite quickly, formalising the proposals before autumn if possible.
As an initial step, the team will be brought together in a private Slack
channel. So please reach out to one of the board members in the general
channel of OpenNTF's Slack if you wish to be involved.
This is your community,
and we can only function if there is a committed community of active participants.
So please take this opportunity.