Hi Ron,

My questions to candidates would be something like:

- Do you think a stronger leadership from the Squeak Board is needed?

- Do you think Squeak is currently trying to be too many different things for too many different people, and that this is slowing down advance?

- If the previous answer is Yes, what would you like to remove from the image?

- Do you have a position on where should Squeak be headed?

- How do you want Squeak to evolve next year?

- Do you think it is needed to pay more attention to code quality and less attention to feature lists?

Thanks, Juan Vuletich

- Do you want to Ron Teitelbaum escribió:

Hello everyone,

I'm hoping to provide to the community an article about each person that is running for the 2007 Squeak Board. What I would like to know from you is what you are interested in knowing from each candidate. Could you please take a few minutes to either respond to squeak-dev or send me a personal email letting me know what questions you would like asked?

I know it's easy to ignore posts like this but I strongly encourage everyone to participate.

Besides basic bio information here is my first cut of questions:

1. Do you support stepping up fundraising? If so what do you propose to do

with the money collected?

2. Do you support bounty projects? If so can you lay out how you would like

to see a bounty program administered?

3. Do you support incorporation and not for profit tax status for Squeak

Foundation?

4. What do you believe is the future of Smalltalk?

5. What do you think the community is doing right, what should be improved?

6. Should the Squeak be represented at more conferences?

If you like these questions, don't like them, or have suggestions about new questions please let me know!

If you like the questions feel free to email me directly: Ron@usmedrec.com to save list traffic.

If you need any help setting up your squeakPeople account or have any questions about the election that is coming up, I will be happy to answer those questions too. You can either email me directly, or the news team at news@lists.squeakfoundation.org . If I get good general questions I may post those and the answers to squeak-dev or weekly squeak.

Thank you for your participation!

Ron Teitelbaum Squeak News Team Member Squeak Elections Team Member

...

-----Original Message----- From: Daniel Vainsencher Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2007 1:58 PM

Hi everyone,

Its time to start our second election of the Board. I think this is very important - I think that having an elected board has significantly improved some things about how the community works:

1. We have been able to tackle projects that previously did not have

enough consensus, such as the relicensing of Squeak and an open process for stewardship of the release process. 2. We have a solid basis for trust and diversity in our board, where before the composition of the leadership may have seemed somewhat haphazard.

I personally think we had a pretty kick-ass board this last year. While it got off to a somewhat quiet start, recently there have been quite regular meetings of the board, with updates to the mailing list, and additions to the board agenda regularly solicited. Do you agree this worked well? do you think you can do better?

Well, this is your opportunity. Starting today, and for the next 2 weeks (until 18th February '07), candidates for the Squeak board are invited to announce themselves on this mailing list. If you do not wish to run yourself, but would like to see either a particular Squeaker as a candidate, or you want something about this election or board term to happen differently than is described below, right now is the time to start discussing right on this list. If you are not sure how to go about it, feel free to send a mail to the elections team mailing list, or me personally.

In particular, when applying, candidates are encouraged to mention their background, general reasons for running, and particular plans if they get elected. Other candidates and all squeakers are invited to pose additional questions.

What happens then? the following is our planned schedule, and we don't expect it to change much. For 2 weeks starting from the 18th, prospective voters are asked to make sure they are registered. Remember that the basic criterion for voting is having an SqP account that is validated at least to the Apprentice level. This is also a good time to talk to other Squeaker communities and get them involved. As in the previous elections, we will accept votes from other communities, but to waive the SqP requirement, we need a well known representative of this community to contact us at the elections mailing list.

The voters list will be finalized on the 3rd of March, and the CIVS (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html) election started. The election will run for 3 days, and the results announced on March 7th, 2007.

Daniel Vainsencher and the Elections team

Hi Michael,

Michael Haupt escribió:

Hi Juan,

aren't some of your questions a little suggestive? (Well, that was a suggestive question too, heh.)

Sure they are.

While I'd agree with them content-wise, I'd rather put them in a more "what is your opinion on..." way, e.g.,

Ok.

On 2/3/07, Juan Vuletich juan@jvuletich.org wrote:

...

• Do you think a stronger leadership from the Squeak Board is needed?

How much strength of leadership should the board exhibit?

I think the board should find ways to find out the opinion of the community on key issues, and make decisions. My questions show the kind of issues I'd like the board should decide on.

...

• Do you think Squeak is currently trying to be too many different

things for too many different people, and that this is slowing down advance?

• If the previous answer is Yes, what would you like to remove from the

image?

What is your opinion on the breadth of functionality supported in the image, and its possible effects on advancement pace?

Terrible. The image currently includes almost every experiment ever done. Most of them have been abandoned for years. This is the main reason for the huge amount of code in the image. Lots of complexity. All against real advance in quality. You can find my reports as the Morphic Team leader, to read more about all I wanted to remove from the image (and could not get consensus to do it).

...

• Do you have a position on where should Squeak be headed?
• How do you want Squeak to evolve next year?

(Not suggestive ones in my opinion.)

...

• Do you think it is needed to pay more attention to code quality and

less attention to feature lists?

What do you think about the tension between code quality as opposed to feature extensions?

I think the base image should be top quality. And with very little features. Everything else should be outside the image, and managed by a team. Something like my reduced image at http://www.jvuletich.org/Squeak/EToysFreeMorphic/EtoysFreeMorphic.html , or Pavel's works, or Spoon.

Best,

Michael

Cheers, Juan Vuletich

About quality I would like sugges the following action that **we** could perform.

I would like to take the classes that are in pavel image as a starting point and check their comments and check their tests. We could define the class of attention for a two week period and produce some tests. I think that I could allocate one or two evenings on that task per 15 days. So far doing it alone is not fun but if we could pair program this may be really fun.

So if someone want to join let me know.

Stef

tim Rowledge escribió:

I'm interested to hear from people about just how 'strong' a leadership they think can be provided and how strong they want. There is a simple practical problem with any idea of 'strong leadership' in a completely free and open community and that is that there is no power at all, no force , no control, that the 'strong leaders' can exert unless people voluntarily accept it. If I say "I am the mighty leader and lo! Morphic shall be Pink!" it really has no possible consequence unless a significant number of people think pink. Or maybe unless I can get some more of that mind control drug into the water supply.

Then we are in a sort of deadlock. As getting ALL the community to agree on anything is almost impossible, no decisions can be made. Therefore all we can do with the release image is bug-fixing. If the board can not define a direction or a list of objectives, who can?

I believe Squeak needs bold decisions. The board needs to find ways to understand what the community wants and what it can do. And it needs to make those decisions, organizing teams to implement them, etc.

This year the current group of people on the board has tried to concentrate on establishing some routines and conventions for good governance. Sure, that doesn't make for great headlines about dramatic leadership but it does, hopefully, result in a well established, legally sound, open, transparent and honestly run foundation. After that we collectively can start work on raising money and more excitingly, spending it.

That's great. I really appreciate the work of the board this year. In fact, I'd like to keep most or all of the members. But many things can be done right now, without money, if we know where we are headed.

tim

tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Rules for Optimization: 1. Don't; 2. (for experts only) Don't Yet

Cheers, Juan Vuletich