Community Input Requested- Transition Towards Executive Director
Noah Smith
Fellow Islandorans,
Given the staffing changes at the Islandora Foundation and the potential for redefining our organizational structure, the Leadership Group (as the strategic planning body of the Islandora Foundation) is proposing a change to the Islandora Foundation staffing model and is reaching out to the community for feedback and comment.
After much discussion, the Leadership Group recommends that we prioritize hiring an Executive Director instead of an in-house Tech Lead and/or a Community Manager at this time. We envision a strong Executive Director who will coordinate community collaboration and innovation and bring together the multiple institutions, users, vendors, and developers that work on Islandora. The Executive Director will work to implement a shared vision for the project and the community, with a key deliverable being the coordination of the community and its extensive resources to ensure a feature rich and stable platform for the community, by the community. Islandora's codebase, documentation, and user base continues to grow and having a person that can support and build on that growth seems more important at this time than having a dedicated developer managing and contributing to the codebase. This change in focus addresses what the Leadership Group sees as the most critical needs of the IF at this time: growing and strengthening our community.
To mitigate the risks that might be associated with moving away from the Tech-lead model, we believe some of the following changes may be necessary:
Work with the TAG and Committers groups to ensure a strong, shared vision for our technical roadmap and clear guidelines around release and review/acceptance of community contributions.
Creating a model for stipends or other incentives for key community contributors, especially (but not limited to) those that manage releases.
Making this transition after the upcoming Islandora 8 “2.0” release makes most sense to us, but we need to know what you think about this proposed direction. We encourage conversation in this thread as well as direct comment via this Google Form, however you feel comfortable. We will follow up later in August regarding the feedback we have received and our next steps.
On behalf of the Islandora Foundation Leadership Group:
Noah Smith (Interim Chair), Born-Digital
John Eden, discoverygarden Inc.
John Herbert, LYRASIS
Mark Jordan, Simon Fraser University
David Keiser-Clark, Williams College on behalf of Islandora Collaboration Group
Gabriela Mircea, McMaster University
Donald Moses, University of Prince Edward Island
Jean Phillips, Florida State University
Kirsta Stapelfeldt, University of Toronto Scarborough
Jordan Bass, University of Manitoba
Noah Smith
Rosie Le Faive
Dear Members of the Board of the Islandora Foundation,
The Technical Advisory Group is concerned by the Board's decision to seek an Executive Director rather than a Community Manager and Technical Lead.
As the Tech Lead, Danny Lamb kept the software as a unified whole, because he was intimately familiar with all parts top to bottom, the various deployment methods, and what different groups of developers were doing with it. Without a Tech Lead the community risks fractures as people attempt to tweak the software to meet local needs in ways that are incompatible with community development.
As the Community Manager, Melissa Anez made all the non-technical parts of the community run smoothly. She managed things such as meetings, the event calendar, the website, the sandbox, and the interest groups. Having someone knowledgeable representing the foundation, with a high degree of availability, played a huge role in making the community welcoming and accessible.
Both of these positions were crucial and it is unclear that the position of “executive director" will cover these roles as it sounds more focused on marketing and negotiations rather than boots-on-the-ground code or people.
At the moment, the TAG does not have a clearly defined mission, aside from advising the Tech Lead on official deprecation of specific software component versions (from the testing matrix, and thereby, from official Islandora support). In the absence of a Tech Lead to whom the TAG reported, the Board may consider giving the TAG a clearly defined role in guiding Islandora development.
The members of the TAG believe we can provide useful suggestions and even setting priorities/ creating timelines for improvements or areas of focus. We can see ourselves setting technical priorities based on strategic goals set by the Leadership Group(s). We could also create technical roadmaps and potentially set up sprints. While release management has never been done by committee, nor do we feel it should, we could suggest schedules for adoption (or relinquishment) of specific components.
However, the Islandora foundation will need to provide the TAG with strategic priorities and/or individual concerns (e.g. specific technical decisions as they come up) as the TAG will not, as a body, be monitoring what needs to be addressed. The TAG will rely on the Islandora Foundation to keep track of who, at which institutions, is interested in which features or improvements, and to do the actual organization and implementation of sprints. Furthermore, the TAG will need to know who at the Foundation the TAG reports to, and to have someone who attends the meetings who can do the reporting.
Overall, the TAG looks forward to a more formalized structure and taking a role in guiding future Islandora development. However, we are worried that one Foundation employee will struggle to provide the level of integration of code and community that we had with the previous two full time roles.
Paige Morfitt
Islandora Metadata Interest Group (IMIG) feedback on Executive Director as replacement of Tech Lead and Community Manager positions
The following attempts to capture the general themes of the IMIG’s discussions on replacing the Tech Lead and Community Manager positions with one Executive Director position.
If the desire is to have one position with the skills and responsibilities of both the Tech Lead and Community Manager positions, we have concerns about:
Whether it will be possible to find both of these skill sets, in a balance way, in a single human being
Whether this is a reasonable workload expectation for one person, and whether the salary for such would be equitable
However, our reading leads us to believe that the proposal is more an expansion, prioritization, and rebranding of the Community Manager position, with better compensation. We have the following concerns about eliminating the Tech Lead role:
The Islandora codebase and the surrounding technical ecosystem are large and complex. Few if any other than the Tech Lead are tasked with having a comprehensive understanding of it.
The Tech Lead was required to apply this overarching understanding of the full stack and its technical implications, along with a position of neutrality and focus on the community as a whole, to balancing the sometimes conflicting approaches and priorities of community contributors. For contributors to the community, The main priorities of community contributors generally must be meeting the needs of our institutions, patrons, and clients. We fear that lack of a Tech Lead could leave the Islandora project vulnerable to being developed in a direction that does not meet the needs of the larger community, because some actors had more time and resources to write code and participate in meetings.
The skill sets of managing people/community and managing technical projects/work are overlapping but very distinct. Further, we fear that much of the more important invisible, infrastructure, and maintenance level work that Danny was responsible for (maintaining sandboxes; ensuring that technical support questions are answered; coordinating sprints and releases; being a point person for working/interest groups to provide input on technical feasibility and next steps; hounding people to actually make the contributions they promised in meetings; directly taking care of critical technical issues, etc.) will fall through the cracks and leave a project that already feels increasingly chaotic spiraling into greater entropy
For many of us, “Executive Director” brings to mind someone with a corner office and support staff. We would feel hesitant to reach out to someone with this title for help on technical issues or Zoom meeting scheduling. Having the “Executive Director” at your meetings might make people reluctant to speak up candidly. We are concerned that the sole official contact at Islandora being the “Executive Director” would make the community seem less approachable to newcomers and fewer resources and less ability to be active contributors.
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