[candidate-sr2015] Rich Barlow for Engineering

[Rich Barlow]

Hello Friends,

I’m announcing my candidacy for the “Engineering” position on the
Steering Committee.

If I win the vote, then I will only accept the position if the following
SC positions are filled by the following people:

* Engineering: Rich Barlow
* Sponsorship: Rob Spanton
* Events: Sam Phippen
* Schools: Jeremy Morse

If this committee is elected we will run the SR2015 competition event in
a fashion that is identical to SR2014.

I will resign from the committee on the 1st of June.

We have all also agreed to halt the current charity application process.
We expect that it will be halted within the week.

Thanks,
Rich

[Rich Barlow]

[Peter Law]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for standing for a committee position and for the effort you
have put in over the last year or so in this role.

When you previously applied for this role [1] you said:
> ... now that I'm not based in Southampton, I will be
> forced to take a more management based approach, rather than just doing
> everything myself last minute.
*snip*
> Now it's time to see how many months prior to kickstart
> we can have the kit ready to ship.

The aims you set forwards were admirable, and while we did ship the
kits at Kickstart this year we cannot unfortunately measure the
advanced time by which it was ready in weeks let alone the months you
aimed for.

Instead I felt that many aspects of the kit preparations for SR2014
were among the most opaque that SR has ever seen. The pieces you
personally handled (the new power board) I felt were fine for the most
part, though it would have been nice to have had the docs for them
ready more than a few days before Kickstart.

With regards to the rest of the kit preparations, I was amazed by the
lack of information [2] being made available by those you had
delegated it to. Was this silence a result of there being no
information (and thus everything happening last minute, as you said
you didn't want to happen), or were you, too, in the dark about much
of the preparations?

Rob has stated (see his reply in [2]) that at least some part of this
silence was due to being too busy to publish the information. One
would have thought that this is something that would be alleviated by
the shipping of the kits, yet there has been very little action from
yourself or any of the other maintainers of the kit.

While some initial quite period is reasonable, we are now a number of
months later. Several issues with the kits have been found and raised
(both by competitors and blueshirts) with many of them having been
fixed by submissions into gerrit. Despite this we seem no closer to
actually shipping these much needed fixes.

What assurances can you give us that the kit issues will be fixed in a
timely manner, and (separately) that you will not allow the
engineering work to reach the point of being too busy to publish even
status reports?


Moving away from the team kits yet surely still within the realms of
the Engineering role, I'd like to look at the other SR engineering
projects. There is a large collection of tools and services which
ensure that things run smoothly, yet I have only rarely seen any input
from you on any of them during your previous term in this role [3].

Even though the SC roles are intended to be more guidance than
execution, I am surprised by your apparent lack of interest in these
projects. Do you believe that they are already performing as optimally
as they could?

Do you have any other specific comments about what you plan to do over
the course of the next few months?


I sincerely hope that you will consider the topics I've raised here
and respond to each.

Thank you,

Peter

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/srobo/01dxAnzIdW8/discussion
[2] "Robot brain development"
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/srobo-devel/X_iwOBfOBHs/discussion
[3] I feel I'm well placed to say this -- I maintain many of them