[Bf-committers] Module Owner teams - proposal to extend & formalize it more

[Jonathan Williamson]

As an artist I think this is a great idea. All the developers do a great
job but sometimes the artist feedback is needed to better develop tools and
features that fit into the artist/production workflow.



On Tuesday, June 11, 2013, Ton Roosendaal wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> ----  "How do I get a feature in Blender" ----
>       (or, who is making Blender anyway?)
>
> I'm a very firm supporter of empowering people who *do*, the ones who can
> get work done or who have proven to be realizing work before.
>
> That reflects in our "Module Owner" organization. Developers who actively
> contribute to Blender are also the ones who can make decisions in that area.
> Module teams currently have owners (who can work quite independently) and
> team members (who need to ensure an owner is being informed and agrees with
> work).
> Module teams accept responsibility for bug fixing, patch and code reviews,
> and help out new developers in the area.
>
> In practice - we're really quite awesome in this regard - the module teams
> have good connections with users. However, I think we're not functioning
> optimally here. With Blender growing, with more people being active, and
> with all the high quality demands and requests, we should consider to
> extend our Module organization now.
>
> My proposal is to ask each module team to invite at least one involved
> user to formally join the module teams. The current owners/teams can do
> this all based on their current networks, and can decide for each
> individual whether it's an "owner" or "member" role. For bigger modules,
> having an artist co-owner is really preferred though.
>
> The choice for such users-members can be simply based on the same
> principle as we do for developers - based on actual achievements in the
> area and shown interest to be involved.  We can keep module teams
> self-appointing too, owners decide themselves who's joining. Only when
> needed, the 'project admins' will interfere in the process.
>
> The consequences of this proposal can be quite minimal - it just means you
> need to get agreement on feature decisions with one more person. Better
> would be if the new user-members then also actively participate in all
> discussions, feature proposal reviewing, release logs and communicating
> decisions when were they made. It will help developers a lot, to offload
> work to others especially. :)
>
> I also want to emphasise that we currently informally already do this a
> lot. A great example is how motion tracking was implemented with artist
> Sebastian Koenig as 'owner' too.
> We also already have several mailing lists with activity for areas as vfx,
> cycles, python, robotics and animation. We can extend this when needed
> easily.
>
> I know it's not democracy I propose, I really don't think voting is going
> to get Blender further anytime. Getting more people involved, and having
> them empowered _is_ helping though. It's still going to be organized chaos,
> and will go with a lot of squeaky wheel greasing. But hey, that's open
> source dynamics!
>
> For more about the current owner teams:
> wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Process/Module_Owners
>
> Note: the current "project admin" team is just three people now. That role
> hasn't been needed really in the past years, but I'd welcome to have a
> great (UI) designer member there. This is going to be based on practical
> involvement & achievements too, based on those who helped out with Blender.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Ton-
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org <javascript:;>   -   www.blender.org
> Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
> Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands
>
>
>
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-- 
Jonathan Williamson
http://cgcookie.com