Welcome @Heather_Burns. I’m excited to see someone with your background and skills involved in the project.
Where do you anticipate most of your time being spent - code or community organization or MaidSafe organization or government advocacy etc?
The role seems very broad so I’m hoping to get a better idea of what the focus is likely to be, although I appreciate this is hard to know in advance!
For example these are some of the different areas I could imagine you might engage with
consensus and governance code, eg tezos style design work, bitcoin/ethereum style consensus mechanisms, node upgrade mechanisms, the technical design and implementation of consensus and governance
consensus process, eg the bitcoin mailing list, BIPs, RFCs, community polling and feedback, farmer / miner signalling and consensus building, dispute resolution such as the bitcoin blocksize issue etc
organizational processes, eg MaidSafe internal decision making and connection with the community, encouragement and direction for third party contributors and organizations, cooperative groups like Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and Linux Foundation, ie deciding how the organization should progress rather than the Safe Network product itself
political lobbying and media exposure
Also I’d love to read your book Understanding Privacy, any word on when it will be available?
@mav The trick is to do all of those things in the right order. Project governance comes before community governance; community governance comes before code governance. Human governance underlies all of them: the steps we take to ensure transparency, accountability, and recourse at each level of the project. We have obligations to our own community, we have obligations to those who will use the Safe Network, and we also have obligations to be a good OSS and public citizen, and we do that by checking ourselves against those three steps at every stage and level of the project.
So my first task is to make sure that I understand the most essential foundations of the project’s governance and procedures, such as decision-making authority, before getting too deep into technical particulars. I’ve seen some good best practice examples of these processes in open source communities, and my god, I’ve also seen some horror shows. I bring lessons learnt, good or bad, from both.
In doing that task, and in all the work I’ll be doing at MaidSafe, it’s my job to ask questions which might come across as tricky, or difficult, or awkward: that’s to make sure we get all of these things absolutely right for the benefit of everyone. Better to hear those questions from from me, when issues can be addressed and potential problems can be stopped, than to hear it from outside after it’s too late to fix. So if I occasionally come across as difficult or challenging: that’s my job. That’s how we’ll bring the best possible project to the world, on the most solid and accountable foundations.
As for the book, hopefully spring-ish. I have no conception of time or date anymore.
This sounds great Heather. The community has learned a lot from David and each other about how to respond to challenges of different kinds so I hope you’ll find us receptive even in disagreements, and willing to learn from your experiences.
It speaks very well of MaidSafe that they hire people who ask provocative and challenging questions. I’ve worked in places where that got me a disciplinary hearing…
Welcome Heather, very much looking forward to progressing governance priorities for the Safe Network, a topic I have (rather ignorantly) opined about now and then over the years on this forum.
There is some real world examples unfolding at the moment in some rather large projects that have run into problems with their initial choice of governance priorities. A fascinating field of research…
