Dave Huelsmann
Dave Huelsmann was Treasurer of Open Source Matters, Inc. from 2008 to July, 2010 and Joomla Forum Global Moderator from 2005 to November, 2010. Now retired, he was a senior healthcare executive who managed large and diverse clinical laboratory, radiology, electroencephalography, and centralized patient transport operations/departments in both not-for-profit and for-profit companies throughout the United States.
Dave was a Navy Corpsman who served in Vietnam while attached to Seabee battalion
MCB-71.
On October 30, 2011, Paul Orwig summarized the next steps for the proposed reorganization of the Joomla! Leadership:
- Let's discuss and decide if we still want to move forward with the changes that we agreed upon in San Jose as proposed in the blog, or
- do we want to adopt one of the alternate proposals that came out of the JPeople discussion, or
- do we want to not make any changes.
Interpretation:
- Do we go forward and ignore the feedback from the community?
- Do we adopt one or more of the community's suggestions from J!People?
- Do we leave things as they stand now?
If you go to all of the trouble to establish goals and objectives with teams - even all volunteer teams, then it behoves you to ensure that you follow-up with those teams and establish their success, partial success, or failure in accomplishing those goals and objectives before you go down the path of establishing new goals and objectives.
Back in May, 2011, Paul Orwig published the goals and objectives of the PLT (Production Leadership Team), the CLT (Community Leadership Team), and OSM (Open Source Matters). Now in late October, Paul is calling for setting new goals and budgets for 2012 but he is not calling first for how those teams did against their 2011 goals so far. This is simply a complete failure of the OSM board and its leadership in ensuring that the goals and objectives actually mean something and are not simply slid into a drawer somewhere and forgotten.
It's all about disenfranchisement isn't it? That, combined with a severe accountability deficit has resulted in the minority (the 1% - Joomla! Leadership) fixing the system so that the majority (the 99% - Joomla! Community) have lost trust. Once the community loses trust in the core fairness of the Joomla! system then the system itself is in deep trouble. Currently it seems that the Joomla! Leadership is thinking of its own interests as distinct from the interests of the Joomla! Community when instead it should be bending over backwards to ensure that the two groups are on the same track together.
The good will earned by an accountable and transparent OSM is one of, if not the most important, of its assets. Volunteers will invest their time in Joomla! when they trust that OSM is acting ethically. And developers and users of Joomla! will return for services, and recommend Joomla! to others, when OSM has shown to be accountable for its actions.