Who is "Joomla! Leadership"?

Comment by Wilco Jansen on December 18, 2009 at 6:33am

There is indeed a lot of mis-understanding of what the leadership of Joomla is. There is a formal side which I will go into shortly after, there is also an informal side that one is based mainly perception/reputation.

Ultimate control on all Joomla assets is in the community oversight committee made out of the following people: Brad Baker, Chris Davenport, Alex Kempkens, Sam Moffatt and Ole Bang Ottosen. The COC can vote in and out OSM board members. OSM was designed to manage trademark, legal and financial but their role is changing (as for example events now is under OSM). OSM board members currently in place can be found at the following link: http://opensourcematters.org/osm-board.html

The Joomla leadership teamis listed at the following URL: http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla/the-project/leadership-team.html, operationally they are leading the various working groups. The following working groups are available:

* Joomla Production Workgroup
* Joomla Community Workgroup
* Joomla Leadership Team

This of course is a discription based on the facts. It can be very confusing who is actually leading efforts since there is no single person who is leading all efforts and communications are not always clear on who decides about what (and how the decission making process is working).

Hope this answers your question.

Comment by David-Andrew on December 18, 2009 at 7:12am

Hi Wilco, thanks for your reply!

Ok, so ultimate control is with the Community Oversight Committee.

Q: How do people end up in the Community Oversight Committee?

A: ?

Workgroup leaders are also the members of leadership team.

Q: So how do people end up in one of two workgroups?
A: By a vote from the current team, saw this just now: Voting for a new workgroup member

Comment by David-Andrew on December 18, 2009 at 8:30am

Q: How do people end up in the Community Oversight Committee?

Comment by Amy Stephen on December 18, 2009 at 8:48am

David -

The Community Oversight Committee was created with the June 28th announcement. I believe the membership was simply those core team members prior to the creation of the Leadership Team. Before the CoC, it was the Core Team, as a whole, who provided oversight to OSM.

The question for me is, if the CoC goes away, how are new members added to OSM? And, how are members removed from OSM, if necessary?

The logic in having the Leadership (Core) oversee OSM is that is where the contributors are and the work is being accomplish, and those are the ones who should have the most authority and decision making. To separate that oversight means we release the assets to a group no longer governed by contributors. Our current set up seems to make more sense.

Yes, I know OSM members are also contributors, but I am speaking to the work force of contributors, the working groups, not the individual five or six sitting on the board. I do not understand why we would intentionally establish an organization where OSM is not controlled by those contributing.

Lorenzo - I hope that it is also reasonable for me to be open and share my concerns.

Comment by Beat on December 18, 2009 at 9:34am

Hi Lorenzo,
Thanks for the precisions, and your help in presenting more transparently the team doing the hard work behind the curtains in joomla towers. :-)

btw Nice to know that the committees are not secretive :)
But: As I didn't see public work from these comities, and pretty sure that they are not inactive, does that mean that they are not secretive but working in privacy ? Is that privacy needed for all the work ?

(note to International readers: there is a huge difference between "privacy" and "secrecy" connotations (positive vs negative connotation), specially in the English-US language practice. Some Swiss banks discovered a little late this huge mistake in their acting and in their public relations)

Comment by Wilco Jansen on December 18, 2009 at 4:08pm

Core team membership was done by a vote (70/70 rule), and members were proposed by fellow team members, so basically it is an invite based join mechanism. The COC is what left of the "old" core team, and as Elin mentioned in her post of the 28th of June there are discussion on disbanning the COC, but for now this is not the case. As far as I know the mechanism to be added to the COC is still the same, same mechanism works with the leadership team as you probably have noticed when Andrew was voted back again into the leadership team...this was the first time such a vote could be followed in public.

Comment by Amy Stephen on December 18, 2009 at 4:52pm

Wilco - what post are you referring to from Elin on June 28th? The Leadership Announcement? Is so, just wanted to say that was actually Brad and Chris (and I'm certain all of the others.)

Also, regarding the retirement of the CoC, it appears it is still under consideration, at least if I am reading Brad's response correctly from Dec 12, 2009.

That is where I start to get concerned. If that were to happen, then OSM has no oversight from the contributors (Leadership Teams and working groups). I honestly do not see the logic in releasing the Trademark to a handful of people without oversight of the Leadership Team.

I keep going back to Louis's Fighting the Stupids post - and to me, what he said made good sense.

Comment by Z on December 19, 2009 at 3:30pm

The Community Oversight Committee consists of members of the old Core Team and are listed at the bottom of this page here:

http://www.opensourcematters.org/osm-board.html

This is a problematic structure because the COC is technically a committee *within* OSM. In all my experiences in being on Boards of Directors, the board always oversees the committees, not the other way around, and the committees carry out specific projects/tasks mandated by the board. However, somehow the people involved at the time arrived at the idea that a committee could appoint/remove members of the board, essentially overseeing the board. The problems with this are too many to list.

Equally problematic is the idea that OSM shouldn't be the controlling entity in the project, yet it controls the finances. Everything emanates from the finances—who receives benefits and who doesn't, who travels to which events, etc. If OSM has autonomous decision-making power, as it currently stands, it can dictate to the Joomla Project what it wants without any checks and balances. Technically, the Joomla Project doesn't exist so it has no legal validity.

So dissolving the COC makes sense from a logistical perspective but an active COC would be an appropriate check/balance for OSM. It's a bit of a Catch-22. In my opinion, if it goes away, the power structure of OSM needs to change. Since dissolving the COC requires a change to the OSM bylaws, that power structure could be altered to find a suitable replacement mechanism.

Yes, it's complex. Almost to the point it makes me curious if it was intentionally so for the purposes of obfuscation. But I prefer to think there were honest intentions at the genesis that were just confused by the whirlwind of forking and the calamity of the time.

Comment by Amy Stephen on December 19, 2009 at 5:23pm

Well said, Ron.

Comment by Arno Zijlstra on December 20, 2009 at 3:47am

The problem right now I think is due to man interrupted evolution.
It was not the intention to have management roles basically filled with such a small group of people who have roles in every "entity". The intention at the the start and I agree it was a very confusing and chaotic time was to clearly prevent overlaps, powerplay possibilities and keep simplicity for structure etc.

Over the years many people/voices have left the project but many of them where never replaced and while the project grew like a maniac the management in people/voice volume only declined. People that where/are in management positions took on extra roles that supposed to be done by new people/voices and with that creating a very small group with way to much power.

OSM has been a master in pulling power to OSM, they have managed to position themselves in a way that they have a say now in almost every part of the organization and that's very scary. The role that was clearly envisioned when starting was that they would only do legal and financial matters on a paperwork level. OSM was to have a serving role only so (simple example) if the core put out a request for money to pay for the flight-cost of a summit, OSM should only check if the money was available and if no fat bills needed to be payed first. They where not empowered to say sorry guys but we think that's a stupid reason so we decline, that was simply not their role.

So, the current problem is that there are to few people/voices with to much power being able to force the project in directions that are very different and even counter to the direction Joomla! was created for. Joomla! was created to be a community owned free Open Source Software project managed by a group of people selected from the community that would have a clear and simple but honorable serving role instead of the powerhouse controlling role they have right now.

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