JoomlaLeaks

It looks like the Open Source Matters Board may be making some progress in its new structure. It has been about six months since the new board was put into place and they have been meeting about twice a month and documenting (though without the detail I think should be given) and publishing those minutes on the Volunteer portal of Joomla.com which is an obscure place to find OSM minutes when OSM has their own website.

Notable is the OSM new board seems to be following in the footsteps of the previous board in that they are not publishing any financial information. The board does not seem to be taking their fiduciary responsibilities to heart as there isn't even any apparent discussion of how the expenses are coordinating with the budget  in the minutes of the board.

If you haven't kept up with the changes that are already implemented for the new Joomla! organization, this may come as a surprise. Will it affect the project positively? Those that decided to implement this change think so obviously. However not everyone is sure about the impact. First off, you need to review the new bylaws that were quietly enacted on October 20, 2016. Second, you need to visualize the new organizational structure.

After complete silence it appears there has been some communication about nearing the goal for restructuring.

Just recently on the Joomla Forum, Michael Babker (Past: Release Lead, Security Team Member, CMS Maintainer Present: Framework Maintainer, .org System Administrator, Bug Squad Member) posted the following frustrations:

Here we are in April. In at least some places across the US it is starting to actually feel like spring and in others it is still wintery.In Open Source Matters, Inc. it is actually dreary. There seems to be serious problems in this transition process OSM has embarked upon. It started at JandBeyond in 2014 (Some ground work was actually done in 2011). You will note that once the Structure Team completed it's work and the votes were cast in about May of 2015 there was a supposed: "There is a commitment to increased transparency." However we haven't seen any increase. In fact transparancy is looking more and more opaque every day. For instance, board minutes for August, September, October, and December of 2015 were not released until February of 2016. OSM is doing better so far this year. We actually have minutes up through the March meeting. That was very helpful to be able to see that the OSM Board which was disolved in October 2015 except for the three officers as called for in the current bylaws is allowing former members of the board to attend board meetings and perhaps vote on matters or maybe only influence the outcome. Don't know if they allow a vote for sure as they don't record votes nor do they provide the actual quorum numbers other than to say they have a quorum. While the former board members are still classsed as OSM "Members" due to the quirky setup caused by their New York corporate changeover a few years ago, those "members" are only supposed to vote in an election or in a special meeting.  "Members shall have the right to vote on the following matters only: election of the Board of Directors. Voting on all other matters is expressly reserved for the Board of Directors." So, why are they attending at all?

For a number of years now Open Source Matters, Inc. has done a really poor job of communicating. Since October, 2015 they have gone completely dark! No, I don't mean they have gone to the dark side (in Star Wars parlance). I mean they have gone completely silent. I know, I know, it's hard to tell since they were not that far away from this state to begin with. Now, however, with what is supposed to be major changes to the governing structure of Joomla happening, all communication with the outside world (or should I say those with an abiding interest in all things Joomla) has shriveled up and blown away. Last time I checked, the terms of all of the members of the OSM Board were to end on October 8th, 2015. On September 28th there was a call for a special meeting of the OSM board scheduled for October 8th at 3:30 am Eastern Time (9:30 pm Central European Summer Time (CEST)). That's it - the last communication on the Open Source Matters public mailing list.

Feel like you are not "part of the conversation" surrounding Joomla lately? Well you are correct. The Joomla leadership team (all of them, CLT, PLT, and OSM) have somehow mashed together leaving the rest of us on the sidelines while they conduct their conversations mostly behind closed doors. Every now and then a snippet works its way loose and we get a little insight on how the wheels may be coming off the tracks. For instance on August 28, 2015, Jessica Dunbar wrote (empasis mine):

Hi can we freeze any new Joomla installs, subsites or subdomains. Our current websites are grossly under maintained. Out of 29 Joomla installs 7 soon to be 8 are running on the latest version. There is a small team of people who are actively trying to get sites up to date, clean up content, make sure the templates and branding are correct. But new sites are being built faster than we can maintain.

So here we are once again. Once again we are promised that the new organizational structure will fix all that is wrong with the Joomla! project. So, what is wrong? Apparently there are some communication and documentation issues between teams. Oh, Okay so what has OSM strong-armed the various teams to agree on? Well, it looks like software development teams will take a back seat to the non-technical people who will likely inhabit the board seats of OSM who will then "guide" the community on to bigger and better things. Wait, what? People like me who don't do software development will tell the developers what to do? Yup! Sounds just like big business doesn't it? Yup! Is that good? Nope!

You can picture it can't you? I certainly can. For a number of years now I have been pointing out that OSM fails to provide the Joomla! community with the transparency appropriate for this not-for-profit organization. Even members of the OSM board attempt to remind their colleagues of that duty. As recently as towards the end of last month on the Open Source Matters, Inc. - Public Mailing list Ryan Ozimek OSM Board Member stated:

Board of Director friends, I've seen a lot of great discussions happening on our private mailing list that, while full of beneficial information, really need to be posted on this public list to continue our focus on transparency. Please use this email list by default for all board-wide conversations. Unless it is something that must require privacy to be communicated safely, if it is a board-wide email you're sending, it should be sent here. This is a core tenant of our goal to improve online communications, not just within the Board of Directors, but across the project's growing leadership team. Let me know if you have any concerns

 Guess what happened. No discussion ensued at all. Any wonder there is mistrust of the board members of OSM?

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice

This epigram –usually called Hanlon’s razor- is generally credited to either the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein or to a less famous writer named Robert Hanlon.

So, let's talk about what is not happening at OSM once again.