Haiku Admin Meeting Summary - May 14, 2007

The decision to summarize and publish regular Haiku Admin meetings is a step being taken to improve transparency and openness largely as a result of recent and past community feedback on the mailing list. Additionally, there has been an Admin Team Page provided with some details about the current membership and responsibilities of the Haiku Admin Team.
Haiku Admin Meeting 2007-05-14:

The meeting started off with a reminder to subscribe to the new Haiku Development Mailing List if any attendees had not done so yet.

There was some immediate discussion about Zeta-related build issues that eventually progressed onto the new Haiku Development list.

At this point, the meeting went straight into the agenda items with a quick review of some of the initial WalterCon 2007 survey results gathered thus far. It was noted that only two selections were provided for Europe destinations, and that possibly it should have been more diverse similar to the U.S. options. Further discussion took place regarding results of several other questions. (A quick reminder to readers - if you haven’t submitted your results for the survey, you have until June 1, 2007) Also on the topic of WalterCon 2007, it was determined that more presentation content needs to be defined and assembled.

Next item up was to determine if Admin team membership joining/leaving notifications should be published to the community in the interest of openness. This was agreed upon and Ithamar’s joining along with Stefano’s departure are mentioned on the website in a recent update.

A lengthy discussion took place in this meeting regarding the need for a Haiku “Project Manager” position among the Admin team. There was a suggestion that this position could possibly be rotated amongst the existing admins until a dedicated person could be found, but it wasn’t decided if this would work or not. Several roles and responsibilities were identified for this position: Moderation of admin discussions and decision-making processes, ensuring that decisions and tasks are assigned owners and are acted upon, setting deadlines for decisions and tasks, tracking and summarizing them for the public.

The topic of Openness and Transparency, and the question of what can/should be improved was next on the list. It was noted that the primary areas that are currently “closed” to the public are the Admin Mailing List, and Admin Meetings where the decision making and discussions take place. It was pointed out that decisions aren’t publicized well enough currently and that it would be a good idea to document the “status quo” and publicize it so that the community can understand what is going on with the Admin Team and the current processes. The publication of this Meeting summary is part of this, as well as the content on the Admin Team Page. I would guess that more of this is yet to come as the Admin Team has the time to document more information for the public.

Finally there was a discussion about generating a list of non-developer tasks and publishing it for the community to view and volunteer for. Because this list will be constantly changing, it will need to be maintained and updated regularly. The question was raised about using Haiku’s Trac system to manage this list (Waldemar has already started his own list on the Trac wiki). A more complete list will be worked on.

That pretty much wraps it up for the May 14, 2007 meeting.
This is my first run at summarizing a Haiku Admin meeting - please let me know if I have made any mistakes or if you have suggestions for future postings via the comments - thanks!
I would like to remind readers that any official discussion about the decisions made by the Haiku Admins should be directed to the General Mailing List. Any mistakes in this summary may be posted in the comments if desired or you may use my contact page.