Merge pull request scala#436 from scala/advisory-board-blog

Added Scala Center Advisory Board blog post.

Author: heathermiller

blog/_posts/2016-05-30-scala-center-advisory-board.md

@@ -0,0 +1,124 @@
+---
+layout: blog
+post-type: blog
+by: Jon Pretty
+title: The Scala Center Advisory Board
+---
+
+# The Scala Center Advisory Board
+
+Part of the role of the Scala Center is to run the Advisory Board, a quarterly
+forum for our sponsors to discuss, guide and challenge the direction of the
+Scala Center and how it influences the Scala community and ecosystem.
+
+It was never intentional, but it's become a bit of a joke at EPFL that the
+"Scala Center Advisory Board" was born with an unfortunate acronym! So, when I
+chaired our inaugral meeting in New York two weeks ago, one of the first points
+I made to the attendees was that we have to exceed our acronym and earn the
+community's trust and respect, ensuring we provide a worthwhile and beneficial
+service to all users of Scala.
+
+This respect is not something to be assumed or taken for granted, though we
+have received a lot of support already from many Scala users. The Advisory
+Board's legitimacy as a "guiding light" to the Scala Community is quite rightly
+something we should expect to be challenged on, so it is paramount that we do
+the best with the power we have been entrusted with.
+
+So, what is the Advisory Board?
+
+## About the Advisory Board
+
+The Advisory Board is a separate body from the Scala Center, much as many
+governments have separate legislative and executive branches: the Advisory
+Board makes recommendations to the Scala Center on the work we should do, but
+it's the Scala Center's job to execute those recommendations.
+
+It currently has seven voting members: representatives from each of our six
+sponsors, plus Bill Venners, the community representative. Additionally the
+Executive Director of the Scala Center, Heather Miller, sits on the board to
+report on the Scala Center's activities, and provide advice on the feasibility
+of the proposals under consideration, and Martin Odersky is the technical
+advisor to the board.
+
+The board will meet four times a year, usually via a conference call to keep
+costs down, but when there's an opportunity (hopefully at least once a year) we
+will hold physical meetings. We organized our first meeting to take place at
+Scala Days in New York, as most of the board members were attending. (Those who
+couldn't be there in person this time joined the meeting over Google
+Hangouts.)
+
+Before our first meeting, we were a little apprehensive - despite our
+preparations - about how the process would play out, but having now had our
+first successful meeting, we have more confidence in the format for typical
+meetings in the future.
+
+## How does the board work?
+
+The main goal for each meeting is to define a set of tasks - we call these
+"recommendations" - for the Scala Center to undertake over the coming quarter.
+Each board member can submit proposals for discussion - short overviews of a
+change or project they would like to see the Scala Center use its resources to
+implement - and a few minutes (usually no more than ten) will be devoted to
+discussing that topic amongst the members.
+
+An important aspect of the relationship between the Scala Center and the
+Advisory Board is that recommendations are not binding. This means that the
+Scala Center has the option to ignore recommendations, if it decides to, which
+may seem surprising, but is actually very important. It not only maintain
+independence between the two bodies, but also in ensuring that the
+recommendations received from the Advisory Board are within our budgetary and
+technical capabilities. And this is why Heather and Martin sit on the board, in
+a non-voting capacity: to offer advice to the members on the viability of each
+of the proposals under discussion, so that the debates can focus on making a
+coherent set of recommendations which is actually achievable.
+
+For example, a recommendation to halve scalac compilation times may have the
+support of the entire Advisory Board, but the Scala Center would struggle to
+make it happen, so there would be little point in the Advisory Board making it
+a recommendation.
+
+So the discussions we have around each proposal may more closely resemble a
+*negotiation* whereby the scope of a proposal is narrowed (or maybe widened) to
+garner the support necessary from the board, and confirmation from the
+Executive Director and Technical Advisor that the idea is viable.
+
+Once there's some consensus around the table, we move to vote on the proposal
+and have a show-of-hands to formally decide whether to adopt the proposal as a
+recommendation. For some proposals, we may not reach any agreement amongst the
+members in the time available, in which case, the chairperson may decide to
+defer further discussion until the next meeting, or suggest that the proposal
+is rewritten and resubmitted at the next meeting.
+
+I mentioned at the beginning that it's important for the Advisory Board to make
+good on its promise, but it's just as important that we are *seen* to be doing
+so. So the whole Advisory Board process is open, and we will publish the
+proposals and minutes from each meeting. You will be able to see these in the
+Advisory Board's [Github
+repository](https://github.com/scalacenter/advisoryboard/) in the next few
+days.
+
+## The First Meeting
+
+As the process was new for all of the members and less time was available for
+preparing proposals, we made the concession to allow proposals to be presented
+*at* the meeting (without prior submission), but in future, we will require
+that proposals be submitted to the repository at least a week before the
+meeting to give all the members an opportunity to consider them before meeting.
+
+During the first meeting, we also elected Seth Tisue as the secretary, and his
+minutes will be published in the next few days.
+
+The meeting itself was a success! We deferred one proposal until the next
+meeting (which will take place in August), but adopted four others:
+
+ - to clarify the governance of Scala, including the SIP/SLIP process,
+ - to define a migration path from Scala 2.x to Dotty,
+ - to create a new unpaid "publicity chair" role for the Scala Center, and
+ - to ensure continuation of support of Scala.js.
+
+Over the coming weeks, we will be taking steps to ensure these recommendations
+come to fruition.
+
+It was a lot of work to get this far, but, after our first successful meeting,
+I'm very much looking forward to the next one!
+