Dear Michael How are you doing these days?
In contrast to my earlier e-mail on process transparency, I have noticed that while the election itself is transparent, the path to being eligible in the first place is not. Is there actually such a thing as a call for applications when board members' terms end? Is there a nomination phase? A Q&A period to help people make up their minds?
People can propose themselves. Now they should show that they are not applying to show themselves. So the board will value their accomplishment for the community. For example, we appreciated so much the work of alain and jordi for the organization of esug at Brest and Barcelona that we ask them if they had some energy left for ESUG. Now it should be clear that we do not want a bad fruit in the basket because this would break ESUG board gentle and respectful atmosphere. We are doing that on our free time and it takes a lot lot lot and lot of energy and time. So the atmosphere of the board should be friendly, respectful. We experienced some problems in the past with the organization of some satellites events and we learned the hard way. ESUG is about positive energy around Smalltalk.
In short, how does this work?
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?
Good question; see above.
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.
What amount is being considered? What percentage of the ESUG budget is that?
It should be either 2000 Euros or 4000 Euros or around that level. Notice that nobody ever complained when ESUG supported the work of John McIntosh to clean a bit the Squeak Virtual machine and it was more if I recall correctly. Now was it not in the global interest to have a stronger open-source community? May be not. ESUG decided to give a chance. May be people prefer that we do all our research and teaching in python, Javascript or Ruby? Who knows. I'm not in the mind of people and I'm happy about it :). Have a nice day.
Regards,
Michael
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