The boat is sinking...

This is a quite special bug report. It is about a community issue

IMHO, we should seriously re-think the organization of the Taurus development, and specially the core members (@taurus-org/integrators ). Currently the taurus management (integration, planning, steering,...) is de-facto concentrated almost exclusively on a single institute (ALBA)... and mostly a single person (me). This is neither healthy for the Taurus Project nor for me.

I assume the responsibility for this situation because at some point, 2-3 years ago, I perceived that the Taurus community had gotten enough momentum to be self-sustained, and therefore I neglected some community grooming to devote more time to other pressing issues..., this lead to decreased involvement from other institutes... and then more burden on ALBA... and then less time for community grooming... and this spiraled down to the current situation.

In contrast, let's look at the case of the Sardana community (which naturally should overlap a lot with the Taurus one). Thanks undoubtedly to the great amount of effort put in the last years by @reszelaz in building the community, it is now healthier than ever (i.e spiraling up instead of down). Big lesson here.

So, what to do?

Without discussing specific measures, I see the following general aspects in which we could improve:

  • increasing the commitment from the large institutes that use Taurus (e.g. securing some fixed amount of person-hours from each institute).
  • opening the governance. In 2013 we started with quite a formal structure: a Memorandum of Understanding, rules for the officially approving releases, etc. This was done in fear of introducing instability on a critical infrastructure component, but IMHO a Bazar-like approach would have been better.
  • In line with the previous point, encouraging casual contributors to participate and become integrators. Make the "core team" more permeable and dynamic. Lower the barrier for becoming (and ceasing to be) an integrator...
  • improving communication: re-think about channels of communication ...

I leave it here.

Let's use this issue as the place for discussion, proposals, etc

Please do not leave this issue unwatched and without comments... the irony of it would kill me... ;)