Okay so now that I am over the shock of having been nominated... I'd
like to beg a few minutes of your time so I can relate what I would like
to see happen with SPF. As a preface please know that I post from two
different email addresses but am in fact the same person from either. In
other words... csm @ moongroup.com and csm @ redhat.com are the same person.
I believe we have a couple of serious challenges that this leadership
council can help to solve. One is immediate and the other has near to
mid-term urgency.
First, because of the nature of the internet and open source work itself
we're an extremely disparate group. This is not really an atypical
condition but virtually all of the successful OSS projects I know about
have a "benevolent dictator". Strangely, SPF does not appear to have
one right now. Until recently I believed that where SPF was concerned
Meng was that dictator and maybe he has been (or was) but for some
reason or reasons that I've not discovered he appears to have abdicated
the role. This has left SPF, in the post-MARID world in which we find
ourselves, in a state of disarray. An effective leadership council will
be able to provide recognized adult leadership and get things moving in
the right direction again on the technical front. As the founder and
former leader of the Lunar Linux project (2 years of leadership) I have
experience with the benevolent dictator role and am accustomed to
working with other members in a consensus driven way even when they are
scattered geographically across different continents and time zones.
Second, I strongly believe that there is wisdom in the various comments
PHB has made about SPF needing to become a standards body. SPF itself
is already a defacto standard when you consider its installed base. The
key for the near to mid-term, IMHO, is to capitalize on this existing
leadership position by creating a structured organization that can
maintain SPF itself, as well as become an umbrella organization that can
work to incorporate the best parts of the remainder of the fractious
variety of anti-forgery and anti-phishing efforts. Creating what PHB
has called the Accountable Messaging Standards Group makes a lot of
sense to me and ultimately this is where I think we *HAVE* to go to win!
This will involve creating a legal non-profit and a bunch of other
roles and structure along the way. As one of the five original founders
of the Linux Professional Institute (http://www.lpi.org) and a former
President of that organization I have done this before and have every
confidence that the SPF movement can successfully adopt the same methods
and in fact should!
There is a lot more I could say but for brevity's sake I am keeping this
short. I hope it will suffice to clarify my thoughts on where I'd like
to see SPF go from here and the ends I would work toward as a council
member.
Cheers!
--
csm(_at_)moongroup(_dot_)com, head geek
http://moongroup.com