Governing Board Minutes: 2012/9/27

The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 27 September 2012 at 16:00 UTC with the following agenda:

  1. JavaOne
  2. OpenJDK Scorecard results
  3. Infrastructure update

All Board members were present: John Duimovich, Andrew Haley, Doug Lea, Mark Reinhold, and Georges Saab.

One Observer was present: Mike Milinkovich.

Donald Smith (Oracle) was a guest presenter.

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. JavaOne

Mark opened by noting that JavaOne is next week and that the Governing Board panel session is scheduled for Monday, October 1 at 3:00pm PDT. Doug will participate virtually via Skype. The format will be Q&A, with Donald Smith moderating. Mike anticipated a lively discussion.

2. OpenJDK Scorecard results

Mark invited Donald Smith to summarize the results of the survey that had begun about a week earlier. Donald said that about 80 people started the survey and about half of those completed the entire survey. About eight to ten people provided comments on each goal. Many comments were similar, however there were six or ten really good nuggets. The Project-specific part of the score card had few respondents: About 15 people completed one for JDK 8, giving a few good comments, and only three people completed one for JDK 7u. Overall, feedback from the Project-specified score card seemed random, so no conclusions could be drawn. The overall results were almost always aligned. Based on the feedback, Donald suspected that the Board was more cynical than the general OpenJDK Community. This led him to believe that people would be delighted with improvements when they come. There appeared to be a good distribution of respondents in terms of skill levels and perspectives.

Doug asked where the “comments” in the results document came from. Donald replied that they were a combination of his thoughts and feedback from survey respondents. He asserted that at least a dozen were directly based on comments in the survey. Doug noted that a few comments, particularly around security, appeared to be hiding something. He recommended stating the facts, not defending them. Various board members provided suggestions for alternative wordings of other problematic comments. After that, John recommended publishing immediately with minimal edits.

AGREED: Donald will finish minimal edits to the survey results document so that it may be published before the JavaOne Governing Board panel session.

3. Infrastructure update

Georges announced that the migration to the internal JIRA-based bug system is complete. The next task is to establish a path to making the internal system publicly available. Andrew thought that the single most important thing was to figure out various roles and responsibilities. He wanted to know if Oracle was prepared to let non-Oracle Community members decide what to do with bugs. Georges asserted that it wasn’t a matter of “Oracle letting,” it was a matter of figuring out how the Community can take part without significant additional cost to Oracle. Andrew observed that an open bug system is the foundation of many other future improvements.

At this point the Board adjourned.