Oh, totally @janflowers, I assumed that @jeffneiman was a little bit lost asking here for a review of an internal infrastructure document, and that was why I asked twice about that was the problem he was trying to solve. Clearly there was a reason, and if I could find it out, I’d be able to help more. But I was shut down, and told that it was outside the scope of the question.
I do appreciate when someone decide to help us out. There’s so much work to be done! I’m glad to say that where to store our internal processes and how-tos is not a problem anymore. I’m very happy with the results, as the others are. We’ve been documenting more and more our de-facto processes, but there’s still some work to be done. I’ve been trying to get more visibility on what infra team is doing, While there’s a few things which cannot be made world-public, I really would love to get more people involved. If you have a github account, I’d love to grant you access to the our wiki (yes, I do have reasons why it’s not in confluence! We kinda need it even if confluence is down).
Words have power, right? We are not leadership. There’s no such a thing as an ‘Infrastructure leadership’. We are, collectively, the infrastructure team. Together we write what we do, we own a couple of machines, we try to get some work done. The same way no single developer should be the owner of a Java class or module, none of us individually owns a machine or a process. We are, together, trying to reach some consensus. We have different interests and areas of expertise (while I’m professionally devops’ing for a long time, there are heaps of stuff I have no idea about).
We work as an agile team. We work more or less together to try to achieve some results - which is enabling developers. As we respect others’ work, we get work done. That’s it. No more important than a developer creating code, we are here keeping infrastructure alive! It’s an opensource community, we don’t have a boss to report to. We agree on things and we don’t see others below us on any sort of hierarchy. We are equals. I’m not here to tell @Robby or anyone what they should be doing.
Turns out that the ‘leadership’ word can also be used as a word to describe the ‘boundaries’ between a team and the rest of the organisation, upstream the hierarchy. Usually a scrum master, a spokesperson, someone to defend the team’s interests outside the team. I think leadership is a bad word to describe that, because it implies that the person has some sort of ‘power’ over the team’s internal decisions (which doesn’t make any sense, because the person is there to enable the team, not really to them what to do to or how to do stuff).
But I know @r0bby strongly believes that this is a gap we should fix in OpenMRS community: to have someone from infra team as the spokesperson in leadership calls or any other meetings and communications. My absolutely personal opinion is that I’m quite happy for @burke to do that role (as far it’s a both-way communication route). My understanding is that it’s something he’s more or less doing anyway.
We don’t see ourselves as leader of any kind, because that would imply someone else would be the follower. We are just a team, trying to get things done together.