Hey folks!
Just wanted to sit down and let everyone know where things stand and to give you all a sense of where things will be going from here. As many of you are already aware, Josh has left the team and a few other folks have also taken their leave. This does not mean that Solus will be shutting down, but it does mean that there are going to be some changes to the organizational structure and that I personally will be taking a more active role in the day-to-day operations than I have been this past year or so.
With that in mind, the following items are on my docket for the next few weeks and may be of interest to you:
- Deferring sync. In light of the holiday weekend and needing time to sort everything out, we will be deferring sync until next Friday (1/14). This will give everyone a chance to focus on the transition, without having to worry about day-to-day package maintenance.
- Scheduling one-on-one meetings with the Global Maintainers. I will be sitting down with each of them to clear the air, solicit feedback on project processes and structure, and discuss how their roles might change in the coming weeks.
- Completing the transition of access rights and ownership from Josh to myself. I'll be auditing everything that Josh has graciously provided to me already for anything that is missing and then transferring ownership to accounts which are tied to my Solus email account. I will also be performing a brief audit of our web-facing infrastructure in case I have any lingering questions for him.
- Formally transferring copyright and trademark claims from Solus to Josh and the BuddiesOfBudgies organization. This will free both parties of any future legal concerns and allow Budgie to carry on, unimpeded, with it's continued mission to provide an excellent distro-agnostic Desktop Environment. Solus would like to continue its relationship with the Budgie project as one of its downstreams and we look forward to working with them to provide a stellar Budgie experience for our Budgie Edition.
- Setting up a succession plan. I'm not planning on leaving the project any time soon, but in the event that something happens to me or I eventually decide to retire, Solus needs to be able to continue. I will be putting together documentation for regaining access to our infrastructure and plans for disaster recovery if things can't be recovered easily. I will also be assigning backup access to another member of the Team so that they will be able to pass this information on to my successor or at least use it as interim until a new one is found.
- Designing a new organizational structure for Solus. Recent events have shown that we definitely need to make some changes to how Solus is structured. The project has grown and our existing structure hasn't quite worked out the way we had hoped. I have been in various discussions now where we've started to get an idea of what this might look like and I will be further tailoring this to feedback from the Global Maintainers. One of the biggest differences this time around will be a focus on making it clear to the team and public alike what their duties and responsibilities are and who is the best point of contact for certain parts of Solus.
- Re-evaluating our Community Guidelines. It's clear that we have outgrown our existing guidelines as a project and need to make some improvements going forward. I will be working with the Team to improve our existing Community Guidelines which will then be applied to everyone engaged with the project. A separate document will be drafted in addition to these guidelines to specifically address issues that may arise amongst Team members. Part of the new organizational changes will be establishing who is responsible for mediating these situations when conflicts arise between members of the various parts of the project.
- Growing the Team. In order to meet the needs of a growing Solus, we will be bringing new people into the fold to help carry out duties as required. Some of these folks will be ones familiar to the Solus Community, but we are also looking for "fresh blood" to help bring new perspectives and ideas to the project.
We may be off to a bit of a rocky start, but I'm cautiously optimistic that 2022 will be a great year for the project. I look forward to working with you all to make Solus even better.
~Beatrice
