Greetings Directors,
I hope everyone is doing well!
I wanted to reach out because I have had several discussions over the past week which have had a similar conclusion of need.
This need is best described as an "active feedback loop".
The approach the Foundation has taken over the past few years is to encourage members organizations to send individual contributors into communities to advocate for their problems and/or needs.
I know feedback I have personally received is the approach can be successful for some, but it really depends on two factors. The individual's knowledge and skill in the community to self advocate, and the willingness of the community participants to listen. Obviously, depending on the individual project and what is generally going on, the results can vary dramatically, which creates inconsistency and increases friction of participation. Ideally, we all want participation and collaboration to be low friction, but sometimes low friction is just not possible without conveying the business case so the answer to the question of "why?" is mutually understood.
And so I think we need to look at creating an intentional or active feedback forum where individuals who can speak in those business case terms can connect and discuss potential multi-member collaborations in the wider community. I don't think of this as something the Board of Directors should directly drive, but after discussion with Allison Price it seems like the foundation staff would like to understand if the board feels this might have value before they work on brainstorming.
In an ideal world, I think we would want a forum of individuals who are somewhere in their career between "team leaders" through to "product management" or "business development". This would operate something like a Meta-PTG where we would discourage team level siloing, and focus on problems and challenges in general terms. From there, participants would be encouraged to reach out to collaborate in typical community fashion. The plus side is these individuals should, through their career experience, the business case lexicons and connections to help drive items forward.
For those of you who have been around a very long time, this idea might be reminiscent of long past discussions from the early days of OpenStack. I think the decline in travel falling out from the pandemic has hurt the ability for some of these conversations to just happen organically as they once did. As such, I feel we need to find new, if even old ways to build connections enable more collaboration.
Thoughts? Interest in participating should we determine a viable format?
-Julia