Open Source Initiative

This report is a summary of Zak Greant's Open Source Initiative activities for the week of March 9th to 15th, 2008.

This Week

This was my first week of real activity in 2008 (except for my attendance of the March 2008 OSI face-to-face meeting.)

My primary activities were embarrassingly few. I worked with Alolita Sharma and Andrew C. Oliver to develop requirements for the OSI technical infrastructure. e.g. software requirements, hardware requirements, service level agreements, etc. We are undertaking this activity so that the OSI will have more control over its technical resources.

We agreed to provide draft requirements to the board on the 12th, but missed this deadline. We have asked for a one-week extension, which the board has agreed to provide. Once the board approves the drafts, we will distribute an RFP.

Next Week

• Work with Alolita and Andrew to complete the infrastructure requirements and a corresponding RFP.
• Garden the Trac system: entering new issues, updating the wiki pages and other general administration tasks.

Future Work

In no particular order, this is future work that I hope to find assistance for. If not I will undertake the work myself.

• Customize the Trac user interface. We want to ensure that visitors unfamiliar with the system can quickly and easily understand the state of any given issue that is being tracked. Before undertaking any coding, I will produce screens of the proposed changes.
• Review opensource.org looking for orphaned pages and outdated information
• Draft migration plan for existing OSI services
• Draft fixes to opensource.org templates, with the intent of helping clarify where information is official or informal
• Setup the capacity for private tickets in Trac, to allow us to more easily manage sensitive, private issues. Of course, exceedingly sensitive issues should still likely be managed in other ways -- as there is always the chance that the system can be compromised.
• Enter these various tasks into Trac.
• Find others who are willing and able to maintain tickets in Trac.
• Produce a screencast detailing how to use Trac

Misc.

My OSI participation in 2008 has been limited in part by a repetitive stress injury, as well as by some contention around my work on the Trac system. I am happy to report that the board is now in agreement that the Trac system (and related process) will be used for tracking all public OSI issues. Also, my injury is healing and I am using dictation software to reduce the strain on my wrists. These things combined will allow me to return to active contribution.

Background

When this report was written, I was serving the Open Source Initiative as an unpaid board observer. The OSI has paid my travel expenses for attending the March 2008 face to face board meeting.

I own and operate Foo Associates Inc., a small Canadian strategic consultancy. My major client at this time is the Mozilla Foundation. In addition to my volunteer work with the OSI, I also volunteer with the Free Software Foundation and provide sporadic advice and support to other free software and open source projects.