Governing Board Minutes: 2012/6/21

The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 21 June 2012 at 16:00 UTC with the following agenda:

  1. Making OpenJDK more open
  2. Governing Board panel session at JavaOne 2012
  3. Infrastructure update

Four Board members were present at the start: Andrew Haley, Doug Lea, Mark Reinhold, and Georges Saab.

No observers were present.

The intent of these minutes is to capture the conversational flow of the Board’s discussion and also to record decisions. If you are interested only in the latter then search for the word “AGREED” throughout the text.

1. Making OpenJDK more open

Georges reported that the “score card” discussion proposed in the May 2012 meeting had started. The score card is a list of desired changes and a rough time-frame for when they might be achieved. Andrew agreed that the conversations were going well and that he is mostly in agreement with what was currently proposed. He expected to see another draft of the score card which incorporated his feedback. Andrew expected the score card to be used to measure progress on a regular, long-term basis. He suggested that community evaluation and feedback on this should occur soon, before people forget the past year’s state.

At Doug’s request, Andrew provided some details of the score card content. It was described as “woolly” with things like open decisions on release life-cycles and adding new features. Andrew mentioned that there were many things, like “attitude,” that he didn’t know how to measure but he hoped that things would become clearer in the next draft.

Andrew reported that they’d discussed the desire for a “statement of principles.” This statement would make it clear what OpenJDK was supposed to be doing. Doug commented that quite a bit of process seemed aimed at anomaly prevention; in his view the process should prevent worst-case scenarios but not get in the way during normal operation. Andrew acknowledged that the overall goal is to make the OpenJDK Community an environment in which people would be happy to work.

Andrew related that there had also been significant discussion around the need to have an on-boarding process. Georges explained that there continues to be a huge wall to becoming productive in OpenJDK and that there were relatively few senior developers who could help mentor new developers. He hoped to instill a culture in which all members of the Community work to lift each other up, thus distributing some of that burden. Andrew requested suggestions for a corresponding metric. A few examples of past experiences were given and briefly discussed, but no concrete suggestions were provided.

2. Governing Board panel session at JavaOne 2012

Mark said that he’d requested a panel session for Board members to meet and field questions from the community. He wanted to determine whether there would be sufficient representation from the Board members. After a short discussion regarding availability, the Board concluded that there would be a reasonable distribution of those who could attend.

AGREED: The Board should host a panel session at JavaOne 2012.

3. Infrastructure update

Mark stated that Oracle was executing internally on the plan to move from the legacy Sun bug system to a brand new shiny (yet still internal) system based on JIRA. The tentative cut-off date was 25 July. Doug cheered the mention of a date. Mark continued, saying that the next step was to open it, with more details to come once that effort starts. Georges explained that the team took requirements of the public-facing system into account during the design and implementation of the internal system. Doug asked about anticipated hurdles in making the system open. Mark replied that he suspected that they would mostly be around internal review and approval processes, not technical issues. Doug asked whether this would take months or years. Mark guessed a small number of months.

At this point the Board adjourned.