Hi ESUG members, On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 5:15 PM, Michael Haupt <mhaupt@gmail.com> wrote:
how many people on the ESUG board can be considered representatives of communities of Smalltalk dialects other than Pharo?
here are the members of the ESUG's board: President: Stéphane Ducasse Treasurer: Luc Fabresse Damien Cassou Jordi Delgado Marcus Denker Alain Plantec Serge Stinckwich The rest of this email is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the one of the board. Even though I'm unsure about your definition of "representatives of communities", I don't see myself as being one, whatever the community you pick. When I decided I wanted to join the board this was not to represent Smalltalk or Squeak, this was because I loved both and wanted to spend some time helping. I got elected by participants of the conference during the last talk, three years ago. I believe this is the same for most other members, i.e., we don't represent a particular Smalltalk, we just want to help and do some work for everyone. Now, if a representative of a community wants to work with us, we would love to receive his application. For 3 years now that I'm in this board, we received *a lot of* requests for sponsoring (being projects, participation to the conferences, books, articles, ...). If we didn't accept all requests, I think we are very very close. Most of the times, requests arrive in already a good shape, we see a great potential for the community or a real need, and we accept them. Sometimes, we ask people to work some more on the proposal and most of the time we will eventually accept them as well. I invite any interested Smalltalker out there to send founding proposals, we are always happy to help when we can. Now, let's face it: 2 of the most active participants of the ESUG board (Marcus and Stéphane) are leaders on the Pharo project. But we, as a community, must not forget that both where among the most active participants of Squeak before (I'm talking about code, organization, presentations, books, ...). These two are very active for the Smalltalk community and have been for quite some time now. If they decide to quit the ESUG board (and we already talked about that among members of the board), who will step up and do their job? I think each of them spends roughly 1h per day (probably more than that) on ESUG tasks: preparing the conference, taking care of legal issues, administrating the web servers, taking care of requests for sponsoring... Not so funny jobs. They both prefer coding, believe me. I don't see anyone else in the current board who could do their job and we didn't receive any application to join the board for at least 3 years. Finally, the board decided to raise this issue with you today for 1 reason: we are aware of the conflict of interest! We want your opinion about founding a particular dialect that shares some active participants with the board itself. But while giving your opinion please remember one thing: ESUG did help other communities in the past and we will continue to do it. My even more personal opinion: would it be fair not to help Pharo create a consortium simply because some members are so prolific that they can be very useful for two organizations at the same time? I don't believe so and I vote for becoming a member of the Pharo consortium just as much as I would vote for becoming a member of any other Smalltalk consortium/association/organization/group/whatever. Best regards, -- Damien Cassou http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st "Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them." James Iry