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

[Ton Roosendaal]

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-

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Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands