SEUL: Reorganization

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

I've spent the last several months leading the seul project solo, because
the other leaders are busy doing other things. This has worked (sort of)
since I had free time, and could do that plus push ahead (slowly) on other
projects. However, this is going to continue working less well as my
academic term progresses.

Due to the C|Net radio broadcast + plain luck, we have a half dozen new
volunteers interested in working on the website and related materials.
Some of them appear quite clueful and dedicated.

Clearly we should combine these two statements into getting more people
"in charge". :) Essentially, I'd like to organize the pub-www group as an
anarchy, and hopefully some order/hierarchy/responsibility will result. My
ideal case is that they will deal with the website themselves, fixing
things, noticing things, and responding to other comments/ideas. I would
be able to send suggestions to the list, and they would decide who would do
it and make it happen (or tell me why it was a stupid idea and they
shouldn't do it, I guess :)
An extension to this is that they'd follow along with what other seul people
are doing (and even seul-related projects), and keep the webpage up-to-date. 
It makes sense that a partition of interests (ie, responsibilities) would
fall out of this. Maybe it would be a partition over website sections, maybe
over activities (editing vs drafting vs websearching, etc), probably a
combination. But who knows.

This scheme requires self-motivation. Things will get done if people want
to do them, and they won't get done if people don't. Hopefully you guys can
come up with a scheme that will be efficient and productive.

I'm not disappearing. I just think that we could get a lot more done if
we had more people with leeway and power to actually decide and do things.
I'm sure some of you are saying "Finally, he's moving to a bazaar model. It
took him long enough." My only response is "I hope this works." :) It's
much more difficult to get the bazaar model working in a group of
non-developers, most of whom are interested in discussing but few of whom
are interested in implementing.

But anyway..this is just part of a broader thread that I would like to
start. We need to rethink how the seul project is presented to the public --
currently we're doing some pretty neat things, but I don't think it's
catching the public's attention enough to get us many more workers.

I want to get people together and figure out which projects we should be
focusing on, how we can divide labor to get stuff done, and most importantly
how we can attract the right new people -- there are plenty of people
looking at our website each day, and I'm sure they'd be more psyched to work
if "their particular project" were being worked on. And either it's being
worked on somewhere else, in which case we need to be able to know to point
them to it, or somebody (they) should start it, here.

Please respond to this in the seul-pub group, so we can keep the discussion
organized and in one place. If you're not on the seul-pub group but want to
hear, subscribe ("echo subscribe seul-pub|mail majordomo@seul.org") (or read
the archives at http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/pub/). If you want to get
in on the website work/discussions (which are clearly related), subscribe to
seul-pub-www as well.

This is an important step in our growth. Let's hope we can keep our
momentum.

Thanks,
--Roger