X.Org Foundation Issues Hasty CFP For XDC2012

[agd5f]

It's easy to criticise until you actually have to juggle the board with work and family. Matt has helped organize two documentation book sprints and has managed the EVoC program among other things. To anyone out there who has good ideas or lots of time and energy they want to dedicate to Xorg, please become a member and run in the next election!

[alanc]

Well, consider other models then. A seat on the board for x k$ / year, with N elected community seats in addition, for example. The "organizational direction" can still apply even with open sources.

Who would pay for a seat on the board when the board has no involvement with the direction of the technology and they can get similar levels of influence by just having developers show up and contribute patches on a regular basis? The few who possibly would are those who you would not want to be in charge - they'd want to be slowing down adoption of new 3D features or development of Wayland since they can't adapt their products fast enough, and want to ensure their profits are protected.

Obviously we're looking for funding models that are much less parasitic, but as we don't need to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to support a paid staff, we don't need to be trying to find anything as big as this.

[curaga]

That's why the funding

[agd5f]

Well, consider other models then. A seat on the board for x k$ / year, with N elected community seats in addition, for example. The "organizational direction" can still apply even with open sources.

The foundation doesn't really have the funds to cover a full time person and still have money available for hosting events and EVoC projects at the moment.

[curaga]

Well, consider other models then. A seat on the board for x k$ / year, with N elected community seats in addition, for example. The "organizational direction" can still apply even with open sources.

[alanc]

I feel he's correct about the X.org foundation, not just trying to get more page views. They could fairly easily re-set up their old funding models and hire a fulltime person for managing it.

Actually, that's fairly impossible now. The "old funding model" was that Unix workstation vendors (DEC, Sun, SGI, IBM, HP, etc.) paid annual dues for control of the organizational direction and early access to sources. One of the founding precepts of the Foundation was that we were a true community-based open source group now, with equal access to all, regardless of contribution amounts - and even if we wanted to go back, there are no Unix workstation vendors left to go back to.

[libv]

Matt. Let's put this really plainly: You've been a board member now for about 6 months. What have you done so far? How have you really used your power of an X.org foundation board member to help X or relations?

[Michael]

The big thing over the last three years was the 501whatever thing? How long did that take? How long would it have really taken if some people took _real_ control and action and made a bit of a stink from time to time? And then when it _finally_ was done, michael was the only one to mention it to the wide world!

The more pressing question that should be asked is what the X.Org Foundation plans to do differently now that it's a registered 501(c)(3) organization. They can now more easily collect funds from companies (and individuals) in a tax-free manner, but will the X.Org Foundation now go ahead and try to get back to requesting funds from the different companies -- with a pledge to do something with the funds? It's been much time and several board meetings since the 501(c)(3) status was made known, but there's been no action as far as I know of actually engaging in anything new.

Michael sponsored a few things, but he spent a lot of his time organizing things, with the cost of manpower these days, that is his biggest contribution.

There's also my original XDC proposal - http://www.michaellarabel.com/misc/x...o-proposal.pdf - which I believe I've ever been the only one to actually file a formal proposal backed by data. There was also organized the social event at the Argonne National Laboratories, but that had to be canned when it was waiting too long to find out if there was to be a sponsored Intel/X.Org dinner on the schedule or not. Originally I was told Intel was to be sponsoring something, but that never panned out and so that's why at the last minute I decided to sponsor a 'beer afternoon' so it wouldn't look like a total haphazard and cheap event. And since I like German beer and since I haven't heard of any organization sponsoring any XDC2012 event, I've been talking to Egbert about sponsoring beer again.

I don't think that there really is much more that the X.org foundation should be responsible for, but its trackrecord is really rather poor and it seems that the X.org foundation board members are quite desinterested in anything that serves others.

I do applaud their recent EVoC initiatives, but it wasn't until late last year (and not being in GSoC) that EVoC was really even promoted or talked about...

[libv]

Please explain to me how you got 'not allowed to inform' out of my posts? This is Luc right? C'mon man, I'm trying to help the project. Look at my history on the ML and commit logs.

Depressingly, you reinforce my point. That's pretty much ALL Michael does; point out the misteps and mistakes. There's ~50? people doing the work of what should be probably several hundred. Have you seen the mailing lists? These guys are machines! But there's still stressingly few of them. Mistakes are guaranteed to happen. When I complain that maybe MIcheal is a little too giddy over giving negative coverage of X.Org, you reply with '...not allowed to inform...' ? To me that seems a pretty big stretch.


There are so many stories and articles that MIchael _could_ write about X.Org happenings that would be really cool and interesting and motivating to read, but instead he focuses on getting something out as quick as possible, especially if it's negative (to drive page hits and therefore ad revenue I'm guessing).

What else is there to report? Michael spends most of his time looking at actual technical advances. Pointing both out improvements and issues, and quite often showing benchmarks as well.

So what are the boards assignments and how is the board fulfilling them? Imho it should be more than a twice monthly phonecall just after lunch, just to state that "i didn't act upon X or Y in the last two weeks". It should take more than that to be able to plaster "X.org Foundation board member" over your CV.

The big thing over the last three years was the 501whatever thing? How long did that take? How long would it have really taken if some people took _real_ control and action and made a bit of a stink from time to time? And then when it _finally_ was done, michael was the only one to mention it to the wide world!

I didn't forget phoronix's sponsoring of XDC2011. It was in Chicago last year and I was there. Props to Michael for doing that.

But you'll notice there's no coverage of the EVoC students getting their midpoint payments on time nor what Stuart had to put up with to make that happen.

I hope you do know the story behind what happened at XDC2011. I hope that you have been informed that we probably will never ever get those nice rooms at McCormick university again. Feel free to ask your fellow board members what happened there.

Michael sponsored a few things, but he spent a lot of his time organizing things, with the cost of manpower these days, that is his biggest contribution. Also, Michael tends to spend quite a lot of his time making recordings and capturing "X.org" events. He tends to spend quite a lot of time in often scorching hot DevRooms at FOSDEM, making sure that people everywhere can capture some of that is presented there.

As the organizer of the Xorg devrooms at FOSDEM, i try to avoid the board as much as possible. Luckily, with an event like fosdem, this is an easy thing to do. The few organizational bits that i need for the devroom, i happily pay for myself. A social event also is no longer an official event. I just let people know verbosely where i and some other guys will go in brussels, and this works out real fine and gets us really pleasant evenings with little stress. The only bit i the board does get involved is for sponsorship, and i try to stay as far away from that as possible, i "trust" the board does right to those who want to be sponsored. I would however like to see more accountability, and at the end of the financial year, i would like to see who was sent where for what money in the financial report, which, in my opinion, should be produced _before_ the next elections start.

So again, what has the X.org board achieved over the last few years?

* 501c3
* (barely) yearly elections
* barely acceptable accounting of its own finances (i trust that it has become a bit better in the last few years, after the big stink i made 3 years ago)

Even to me, it seems that the X.org foundation simply exists to support and warrant its own existence.

The real things that the X.org foundation should be associated with are:
* Organizing and sponsoring conferences.
* Organizing and sponsoring infrastructure.

Let's look at the trackrecord there:

Conferences:
* FOSDEM... Well, i just explained the actual X.org foundation involvement in that.
* XDC:
** 2010: Matthieu organized it in Toulouse: Massive success, but somehow the money stuff went all wrong and 10k usd were lost.
** 2011: Michael organized it in chicago: Another massive success. But social event sponsoring fell through in the last month, and the university was paid very late and we got the student union banned from organizing anything at the university and we pretty much can never use their facilities again.
** 2012: Egbert is organizing things at the SuSE office in nuernberg, which will mean that the required board involvement is already very little. Yet egbert did see the need to write a _very_ angry email already. Seems like the board is off to a good start already.

Infrastructure:
* What X.org board paid for services really exist?
* All that seems to be there is fd.o, where:
** All data in ~ was lost a few years ago, as it was deemed that backing up all those nifty little tidbits (like users git repos) were not worth backing up.
** account and project creation are prioritized and or accepted on often political grounds.
** admins abused their root access to vandalize a repo.

I don't think that there really is much more that the X.org foundation should be responsible for, but its trackrecord is really rather poor and it seems that the X.org foundation board members are quite desinterested in anything that serves others.

Heck, for the last few years i have been proposing future board members (i think i was the only one doing so last time round), based on who i think are not just talkers but who are also do-ers, people with a long history of involvement in X and related topics, and who i think would drive the X.org board into a positive, not-navel-staring direction. I have had very little success with this, as many of them simply refuse to run for the board. Part of it is them not wanting to partake in the often very nasty politics of X.org, but the biggest reason is that these people tend to be do-ers, not talkers.

Talk less. Do more. And then michael will have positive things to write about.

[Michael]

If we had a PR person that would probably help, but that goes back to noone wants to get involved. I've tried to help in this regard (PR) but I'm not good at it.

As others have also mentioned, there's a number of ways that could be improved upon from partnering with different organizations (find out how to better collaborate with the Linux Foundation, etc) to using more of the Xorg funds that have been building up (and going back to soliciting Intel/Oracle/etc for funding that since stopped since all it was doing is sitting in their bank account) so then someone could be hired part time for PR/accounting/whatever to various other possible avenues to improve the foundation.

Depressingly, you reinforce my point. That's pretty much ALL Michael does; point out the misteps and mistakes. There's ~50? people doing the work of what should be probably several hundred. Have you seen the mailing lists? These guys are machines! But there's still stressingly few of them. Mistakes are guaranteed to happen. When I complain that maybe MIcheal is a little too giddy over giving negative coverage of X.Org, you reply with '...not allowed to inform...' ? To me that seems a pretty big stretch.

There are so many stories and articles that MIchael _could_ write about X.Org happenings that would be really cool and interesting and motivating to read, but instead he focuses on getting something out as quick as possible, especially if it's negative (to drive page hits and therefore ad revenue I'm guessing).

Do you not count the dozen of X.Org-related posts I write about each week when it comes to new features or improvements to graphics drivers, etc?

I didn't forget phoronix's sponsoring of XDC2011. It was in Chicago last year and I was there. Props to Michael for doing that.

I'm sponsoring again this year I believe, I've been talking some logistics with Egbert.

But you'll notice there's no coverage of the EVoC students getting their midpoint payments on time nor what Stuart had to put up with to make that happen.

This shouldn't be news when something is on time and what is expected of any responsible organization. If I wrote that payments actually went out on time, most people would find it boring or think I'm making fun of the organization for finally getting something out on time. But they did finally get a payment out on time? This is news to me; the BoD meeting IRC logs haven't been updated on the X.Org Wiki since mid-July so it's missing the last meeting or two...