Ouch.
I thought David would have been superb. I must have missed the posts where he
was less than courteous and helpful bt such things happen. He seemed unwilling
to go for a leadership position expressing reservations about it but i kinda
pushed him into it and that all back-fired on me.
Many co-operative groups run extremely well without a specific leader, running
by committee/council or by whoever happens to be most active in a particular
sub-group at that particular time (like a relay race). We seem to be happily
going on like that already so i think it's questionable as to whether we really
need a single leader at all.
I realise that most people are more comfortable taking orders unquestioningly
from higher authorities and need to set someone up to be in charge over them
rather than thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for their own
actions but hierarchical organisations are much less robust than co-operative
enterprises. What happens when the leader is away or orders something daft or
has a personality clash with someone? A committee would deal with those
situations smoothly without any ripples. Hierarchical organisations tend to
fall apart with even simple and obvious problems such as that..
I think this documentation group needs to formalise it's current structure (ie
what are the "working groups" = sub-groups) and just clarify who is
representative on our little committee. Each representative needs a 2nd person
or perhaps each group needs 2 people to represent them. At the moment we have
not really given thought to what groups we need and who would represent them but
i would say the groups at the moment are;
Alfresco web-site and very technical issues = David
Alfresco work-flow and practical how-to = Hal
Non-alfresco work-flow, guidance and tech issues = Jean
Ideally we would have 6 groups including some sort of administration / steering
group in order to keep people from "ganging up on each other" too easily but
artificially creating unnecessary groups is a very bad plan as it can just
create extra "make work".
For examples of good co-operative type organisations look at Mondragon in Spain
or Italy (i think) or Suma or Radical-Routes (or is it Roots?) in the UK.
However both the first 2 are much larger and more corporate than we need to be
and the last is extremely low-tech and might not even have a web-presence at
all. Look up worker co-ops in your area and you might get a few surprises.
Here, just north of London England, we have 1 worker co-op that made components
for the space shuttles although it's more recent products might be less familiar
to home-users. Most people might know of "social enterprise" co-ops or social
firms such as furniture, recycling or grocery stores. I think it might be
because of those grocery stores and such-like that people don't take co-op
structures seriously but many high tech organisations also try to avoid being
too hierarchical because hierarchies are less robust and less innovative
(oddly).
This is all stuff that people working in OpenSource projects should already grok
right to the core of their soul because it's exactly the sort of thing that
makes MS so vulnerable to malware compared to OpenSource projects which are
robust.
"Just following orders" has been a very poor excuse for some extremely bad moves
throughout history. So, lets avoid hierarchical structures and keep things
robust & open to innovation but lets formalise which groups are needed and
identify who is in charge of each group. Perhaps we could have elections if
it's not obvious who is best at what.
Regards from
Tom 
