Organisational structure and procedures | General | Forum

Hi everyone,

This post largely duplicates one I already made, but I'm putting it in it's own thread so it (hopefully!) gets some attention from more people, particularly the other 5 "acting directors".

As part of the current revival, which is really going quite well, I think we really need to try to put more oganisational structure in place.  We particularly need people who are more clearly "in charge of" projects, in some sense, to keep momentum up and on track.  It would also be good if we could more readily point eager new comers to somewhere they could go to help.  Below is a diagram I posted recently outlining what I think is a fairly straight forward organisational structure which makes things a bit less disorganised than previously, but still isn't overly authoritarian.  I've cut and pasted my explanation from another thread

Wherever I've used the word "group" I am thinking of, ideally, a
group of an odd number of people which comes to decisions based on
majority decisions, or something like that.  Basically, ever project has
associated with it a management/organisation group who take care of
things like finances, progress reports, etc.  The "real" work is split
between two sections (with some degree of overlap, presumably), one
dedicated to design and one to construction/testing/etc.  Both of these
sections will have groups who essentially run things, with large,
changing bodies of informal contributors watching, advising, helping,
calculating, etc. (in the case of design) and doing small, independent
construction jobs etc. (in the case of construction).

One level above all of the projects is a kind of overall project
management group, which handles the creation of new projects at
appropriate times and liases with the management/organisation groups of
individual projects to make sure projects are developing in a way which
ensures everything will work well together.  For instance, the decision
on our set of 4 projects just recently is the kind of thing this group
would do.  It's not shown in the diagram above, but of course we should
try to have a larger and less formal community involved in this as well,
suggesting projects, etc., with a group of 3 or 5 people researching,
clarifying, integrating, prioritising projects, etc.  Obviously this
group will not be super active all the time, since new projects should
only be created when old ones finish and/or when we have sudden
increases in available money/manpower.

Aside all the project related stuff, we can have some general purpose
groups, like a finance group, PR/media group, etc.  People in these
groups can interact with the individual projects via those projects'
management/organisation groups, to make sure things happen as they
should.

Obviously at this early stage, we don't have enough people to have
groups of 3 or 5 in all these positions.  While we are getting on our
feet we shoudln't worry too much about having individual people counting
as groups, and/or people being in more than one group at once.  As more
appropriately talented people turn up and want to help, we can flesh
our structures out.

This is a very quick preliminary draft of how we might want things to work – feedback is exceptionally welcome.

I don't care too much how closely we stick to this model, I just think it is important that we figure some kind of structure out soon and assign people to positions.

Another thought: instead of a rigorous engineering process like discussed in the past, maybe we should go with a more software-esque rolling release kind of pattern.  I think in general we can probably get a lot of mileage out of acting more like a software project.  With regards to design, let's have "design committers" who have the ability to commit new, e.g. CAD drawings, circuit diagrams, code etc. into the Redmine (or whatever) project, and a community of non-committers who offer input via, e.g. a mailing list, with the committers committing good ideas and not bad ones, and promoting to committer status frequent non-committers who consistently offer good input via the mailing list.  The entire contents of the Redmine (or whatever) project can come with versions, with a simple x.y naming system or some such, with occasional "feature freezes" etc. while we polish things.  The project construction groups can build particularly releases, e.g. let's build OHKLA 2.4 (or whatever).  We can have a list of requirements which a release needs to satisfy before we committ to buillding it.

This kind of approach is lightweight, familiar, will let us start doing design work on the new projects very quickly (taking advantage of the excellent recent discussion on Arduino-based solutions for PROJECT BALLOON) and should work well enough as long as we do work on a list of rigorous requirements and review how well we are meeting those requirements with each release.

Thoughts?

rpulkrabek said:

Obviously we need to find suitable people for these roles.

Brmj has volunteered elsewhere to take a leadership position on Cloudlab.  I don't know exactly where in the proposed structure here he thinks he'd rather be, but at least we should have somebody somewhere.

Rpulkrabek, I was kind of hoping you might care to take on some kind of role in the Chimera program, and antinode, I was hoping you might like to do the same for COSMoS?  No pressure on either of you, of course, you just seem like the most likely candidates.

I am not sure I will really have the time in the forseeable future to take on a role within a particular project/program, but I would like to be part of the "Project Coordination Group", to plan future programs/projects which link together well and give us a clear but gradual path forward.  I think I'd have the time to do this because there wouldn't be a need for constant time committment since, in effect, the current state of the project roadmap only matters at those moments when one project ends and a new one needs to be created, which will be fairly rarely.

With regards to the "PR etc" group, I figured Rizwan would be part of this group with the title of "Webmaster" or some such, and we should be able to find graphics and writing people to fill that group too.  There is at least one person on /r/tothemoon who is doing a journalism degree and wants to write for us, and we also got some email recently from a freelance technical writer who was interested.

With regards to the finance group, so far I don't think we have any people who would be super keen or qualified to fill that role, which is something of a problem.  Still, design work will always preceed construction work, and design will be free for us so there will be a little bit of time to find someone to handle money (and also to come up with a procedure whereby money is collected and distributed amongst programs/projects).