You know, Tom, when reading Jerry's comment about a "benevolent dictatorship" above, the phrase "benevolent meritocracy" came to my mind. I didn't want to make any such comment because, of course, then we must agree on a definition of "merit".
Jamie's notion of a separate organization or association of developer companies is an interesting one. I'd hope that we could make this organization function in ways that don't make this necessary, because I happen to think that some of the issues - the need to market, in particular - aren't unique to those who hope to build a business off of the OpenACS effort. Of course, my definition of marketing, or at least our marketing needs for today, might differ from some of the ideas that have been floating around...
Anyway, an association of developer companies within the OpenACS framework would be more appealing to me than the rise of a separate group.
Most frustrating to me in all this is that I've been thinking quite a bit about the underlying problem we face, i.e. how to deal with the explosive growth in interest in OpenACS that has resulted from aD's ditching of the AOLserver/Tcl/ACS product.
I've been thinking about it all along, actually, but have only been acting in the very limited scope of the actual OpenACS 4.x project - first things first. We've been evolving a structure for that project that works reasonably well, especially when one considers that most of the folks working on the project are newcomers to porting and in many cases Postgres and/or Oracle.
I've somewhat naively thought that the community was so eager to see OpenACS 4.x delivered that we could focus on making that happen and worry about managing growth in other areas afterwards, i.e. this fall.
I thought that about the web site, for instance, though by May it became obvious to me (and Ben and others) that we couldn't. A solution to that particular problem, i.e. Musea's stepping up to the plate and taking it over, didn't materialize until recently, but one did.
Perhaps we can't ignore other growth-related issues for the next two months, either. I do wish we could. I also wish the discussion could be limited to folks who genuinely want to improve the organization, rather than include people who have the desire to grab a certain amount of control for themselves regardless of how that might affect the organization.
