disconnect from board to active developers

[Daniel Stone]

[Adding members at x.org to the CC.]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 09:43:58AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> 1) X.org has limited funds gotten from company sponsorships, I'd like
> to know what plans for those funds the nominees would have?

I think the major thing we can do is put this into two things.  Firstly,
XDC is valuable, and we should be doing everything we can to encourage
this to grow, be that with financial support or otherwise.  (I also
liked the EXDC that Egbert ran a couple of years ago; that would be a
good idea to revisit.)

Secondly, as I said on members@, I really like the idea of small,
targeted meets.  If we need to get you and Alex Deucher together for a
week to fix the Radeon driver, be that sending you to Canada, or sending
you both to GUADEC/OLS/LCA, I think that's something we should very
strongly consider.

> 2) Due to fact that we have a limited budget, how does your current
> employer feel about your X.org contributions and will funding for
> X.org related travel come from your employer or the X.org funds?

My employer is quite happy about my participation in X.Org.  The initial
work getting the input-hotplug branch off the ground, and all my KDrive
work, has been sponsored by them, and I was encouraged to contribute it
back.

The second question is slightly harder to answer: unfortunately, due to
bureaucracy, I generally have to plan ahead quite a bit (thinking now
about my conferences for the first half of the year) to get sponsorship.
So I can see that there may be one or two times where X.Org might need
to come forward, but in general, my employer foots my travel bills.

> 3) X.org attends a number of "industry" events, like Linuxworld I
> believe, do you feel this is necessary for what is primarily a
> development oriented foundation? or that funds would be better placed
> elsewhere at organising developer meets...

To be honest, I don't put nearly as much value on trade shows as I do
the major developer-oriented conferences (LCA, GUADEC, aKademy, OLS,
FOSDEM, LSM, the list goes on).  If we have representatives in the area
who are willing to attend off their own back, I don't think we should
discourage them, as long as we can put together a proper stand.  If we
don't have enough energy and the result will be substandard, I think we
should reconsider.

> 4) These seems to be a major disconnect between the X.org and
> freedesktop.org organisations (particularly around security
> releases...), at times it seems like the board forgets that we have
> freedesktop.org hosting a lot of our services and goes and does things
> itself which usually would be much quicker done with fd.o support,
> most of the fd.o admins are X.org members, none of the X.org admins
> are active developers from what I know...  do you believe that the
> X.org board should be involved in these decisions or should the
> administration of those machines be handled by a separate admin team?
> (i.e. >1 person)...

I don't believe most admin decisions need board intervention.  I've
already stated that I'd extend fd.o's technical infrastructure to cover
X.Org (userdir-ldap has been generating records for expo.x.org for
probably about a year now; I don't even know the names of the other
machines).  I think that, despite best efforts, the admin side of it is
still a little neglected due to trying to do it all with one person.

One interesting thing to consider is that we have a strong and active
fd.o admin team (myself, keithp, Adam Conrad, cworth, ajax, and anholt),
most of whom, as you said, are members and/or active X.Org developers.
These guys could definitely be entrusted with the X.Org machines, and it
would take a lot of the load off: there's not much difference between
doing security updates for six machines as compared to four.  I think
maybe getting the team to also admin the X.Org machines is an
interesting idea we should definitely consider.

Cheers,
Daniel
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