[asterisk-dev] Asterisk SCF Steering Committee: Call For Participation

[Kevin P. Fleming]

(Apologies in advance for the length of this message; please don't stop 
reading after the first couple of paragraphs <G>)

A little over a year ago, when the Asterisk SCF project was just getting 
started, we invited interested community members to help us form a 
steering committee. The committee's purpose was to help shape the 
direction of Asterisk SCF development, in order to ensure that it would 
serve the needs of community members.

The committee was formed and began having somewhat regular meetings (via 
conference call); the meetings are documented (and recordings posted) here:

https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/TOP/Steering+Committee

In the beginning, the committee's task was fairly easy to define: we at 
Digium had already decided on some basic pieces of technology, and some 
design criteria, but we needed help figuring out exactly how we should 
assemble these pieces. In other words, we knew how to make things that 
people wanted to use, but we needed people to tell us *what* to make.

Some of us at Digium then spent time interviewing various people and 
companies, in order to determine what would be most useful to them in an 
'Asterisk SCF 1.0' release. We combined the results of those interviews 
into a candidate feature list, and asked the committee to help us 
determine whether that was the *right* list of features to build first. 
The group was in agreement, so development began in earnest.

Now it's about seven months later, development has been continuing at a 
frenetic pace... but the committee has become disengaged. It's been 
difficult to get a reasonable number of members to participate in the 
(now monthly) conference calls, and there have been occasions where no 
community members have participated at all. It's understandable to have 
some members occasionally unable to join; everyone has regular jobs, 
travel sometimes interferes, etc., but we'd hoped to have at least two 
or three of the six community members be able to join each call.

In just a couple of months, we intend to be making the first beta 
releases of Asterisk SCF available, and when that happens, it will be 
quite important that we have the community's involvement to ensure:

* that we continue heading down the right path

* that we're addressing the right problems and feature requests that 
arise once the beta testing process has started

* that we're providing the right documentation, examples and other 
assistance to get interested users able to actually use Asterisk SCF in 
their networks

So, I'm posting this call to see if we can get things moving in the 
right direction again; if you are interested in helping to shape the 
future of Asterisk SCF development, please speak up! It's not necessary 
to commit multiple hours per week to this effort, but it's important 
that those who volunteer to be a member of the steering committee be 
able to stay engaged with the project, participate on the conference 
calls, and be able to spend at least an hour reviewing documentation and 
other details a few days before the conference call in order to 
facilitate discussion and decision-making.

For this to be a true Steering Committee, those of us doing the bulk of 
the Asterisk SCF development are willing to commit to documenting our 
research, describing that to the committee and working to reach a 
consensus on how we should proceed... but only if the committee itself 
is willing to commit to being a full participant in the process. Without 
that level of commitment, development grinds to a halt, or decisions 
have to be made without community interaction; neither of those are what 
we would wish to be the case.

So here's the call to action: join the committee, and help us make 
Asterisk SCF into the best framework for building communications 
applications that you can envision!

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
Jabber: kfleming at digium.com | SIP: kpfleming at digium.com | Skype: kpfleming
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org