emPHPower

The advocacy organization for PHP

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FAQ

General

Who is behind emPHPower?

For now its only me.

Are you looking for other people to join the effort?

Yes, absolutely! Right now I am looking for feedback, but more importantly I am looking for a solid group of about half a dozen people that will lay down the foundations with me.

How to I get involved?

Just send me an email. Eventually there will also be a mailinglist.

When do you want to start?

My plan is to gather feedback through out 2008 and then start with founding the organization in early 2009.

Isn't the name "emPHPower" kind of too clever and confusing for non programmers?

Yes, its only a code name. I kind of like it though, but enough people have expressed their concern, that I have accepted that we need to find another name for the real thing.

What is the mission statement?

emPHPower is a mediator and catalyst that empowers members of the PHP community to follow their own ideas.

What ideas?

Obviously this since this is a PHP advocacy group, the ideas that emPHPower intends to empower should revolve fairly closely around PHP.

Examples:

• So organizing a conference on PHP is definitely covered.
• Organizing conference around scripting languages is too.
• Organizing a HTML/CSS conference would be beyond the scope.

What is the target audience?

The audience is PHP.net core developers as well as end users. Indirectly also companies although they may not become members (see below).

Why may you need emPHPower to follow your own ideas?

Depending on how well connected you are, you might not. However even if you are well connected, you might simply save yourself work by leveraging emPHPower. Another key point of emPHPower is that it will be bottom up and not top down. In this way any member can leverage emPHPower as they feels fit.

What are some examples of the kind of ideas that emPHPower would help with?

• Say for example you are a PHP core developer wondering if an undocumented feature is being used (for example the Zend Engine Multibyte support). You can create a poll on the emPHPower website and directly reach large audience (this obviously implies that emPHPower would have failed, if it would not enable people to reach a large audience).
• Or you are planning to organize a PHP conference in your local community. You might appreciate using a checklist that has proven itself and evolved on the emPHPower wiki. You might also need sponsors.
• At the same time you might be a sponsor looking for an event so sponsor. With emPHPower giving exposure to sponsorships, it will become possible to sponsor events that aim at people that are not necessarily directly in the target market (for example sponsoring a conference in a 3rd world country).
• Help people find like minded people in their region to start user groups
• Provide a directory of existing user groups
• Companies currently have a hard time to interact with the PHP community at large or PHP.net core developers. They do not know how the community operates, how to contact it, what the unwritten rules of conduct are etc. With a recognized community beacon like emPHPower, companies would know where to look if they are lost inside the community. There would be some basic documentation for companies on how to get started and of course there would be places on the emPHPower website and ways for these companies to get in contact with the type of developers they want to talk to.

What is the big deal with the Testfest?

In the past common wisdom among PHP.net core developers was that they had to do all the work. Now with the Testfest, suddenly end users helped. End users sat down and wrote tests for them. This frees up more time for them. So they have more time and are more motivated as a result. This in turn also helps the end users. Its a win-win situation.

Given that the Testfest was so great, why do we need emPHPower?

For one we had to scramble a lot to get the necessary infrastructure setup. The PHP.net system administration organization is not really setup to deal with short term ad hoc projects like Testfest. With emPHPower we would have infrastructure and system administrators who are prepared to setup an ad hoc project. There would be a directory of user groups on emPHPower, next to the members list which we could contact for a much greater reach than the initial Testfest.

Problems solved:

• Infrastructure in place for collaboration
• Additional infrastructure available in short time for important member projects.
• User group directory to easily reach large parts of the community

Infrastructure

How will the infrastructure and marketing differ from other community projects?

Again, emPHPower from day one aims at being a non profit global communication hub. This is different since most community websites have a local focus. Others are focused on a specific technology or framework. Then others are backed by a single company.

Will emPHPower compete with existing community efforts?

emPHPower has no intention of competing with local community websites. Of course there will be some overlap and of course emPHPower will try to provide as much information as possible in localized form. Local community sites however can focus much more on the specific needs of your local community. They can also leverage emPHPower to find free content that they can then adapt to their local needs or local communities can find other local communities that want to jointly work on something.

What kind of infrastructure will be offered?

Since emPHPower is bottom up rather than top down, the infrastructure has to take this into account. It will be easy for a group of people to get a mailing-list, a new section in a wiki, a code repository etc.

Wouldn't bottom up approach will lead to a lot of information to digest?

In order not to clutter members with too much information about new things, there will be some social networking features that control how new information is made visible to members. This means that members will be able to build trust networks and areas of interest. New content that matches these criterias will have a higher chance of being shown. Also the more members specifically endorse something, the greater the visibility.

This sounds all quite non trivial, why don't you just use an existing social networking site?

We may do this initially. Then again its important for emPHPower to stay independent of a specific vendor. If there are open source social networking components we can reuse, then all the better of course.

Why do you worry about using an existing social networking service provider?

Example problems with going with an existing vendor:

• If we go with Facebook (which uses a lot of PHP), then Facebook will have a lot of control over us.
• Also Facebook could get bought (there have been rumors about this since forever). So even if we trust one social networking site today, they might change owners. Then we would have to scramble to migrate our content to some other place etc.

Membership

What is the purpose of the membership fees?

There are several reasons for the membership fees. As emPHPower is a non profit organization, the fees will obviously be reinvested in full into the community.

• The membership fees will be pay for the infrastructure.
• In order to be able to be able to react quickly to needs of the community, there have to be dedicated system administrators in different time zones.
• Also in order to support the bottom up approach, the behavior of how information flows will likely need continues tweaking.
• There will also be a need for certain administrative takes that need to be funded.
• Ensuring that there is less risk of people faking accounts in order to get more control over emPHPower.
• With a membership fee it means that emPHPower will be taken more seriously from the outside (again because it shows commitment by its members)
• To provide some bare bones advocacy support like flyers.
• To support local efforts with small amounts of money to jumpstart efforts

How high would the membership fee be?

Without having done in depth studies on this a 50 Euro per year fee for someone living in western Europe seems like a reasonable amount. While the final membership fee has not been determined yet, one of the key ideas is that the membership fee will automatically adjust itself according to the average income in the country for which the member registers. As such the membership fee will be large enough to show dedication to the cause and ensure that emPHPower has enough funds to operate, but at the same time will not be prohibitively high for anyone around the globe.

Why should emPHPower become bigger than the other community projects?

For one because no other community project in the PHP world has the intention of being this global communication hub. This means that the infrastructure and marketing will be laid out differently than local sites. Furthermore, I am very confident that I will have the full backing of PHP.net core developers to target emPHPower to become the communication hub that brings together the entire community. I am also well connected with publishers and conference organizers. With this support emPHPower will be able to reach most PHP users, even if they are not yet active in the community.

Aren't membership fee's going to make it hard for emPHPower to get big?

Obviously joining emPHPower will require more dedication than trying out the latest social networking site. But that is intended. There are literally millions of PHP developers out there. So the potential audience is huge. In the end it will come down to the question if enough people trust the emPHPower idea to join. In this sense since emPHPower requires to be big to be successful, the initial members will have to take a gamble.

Why would the PHP.net core developers fully back emPHPower?

Mainly because I have asked them. Because they agree that nothing like this exists today and that they feel they can benefit if it exists. Also they trust me and know that I have been able to organize and succeed in the past. For example I improved the transparency in the PHP release process by creating and maintaining public todo list. I have initiated wiki.php.net, which among other things have spawned a more transparent RFC process. I have initiated the Testfest, which validated the idea that end users can help core developers, something that was not that clear until then. I am also the co release manager for PHP 5.3 because of the trust I have earned over the years.

Why should companies not be allowed to sponsor emPHPower directly?

In order to be the communication hub for the entire community, its important to stay as impartial as possible. Of course this is very non trivial, even if companies cannot sponsor emPHPower directly, they can do so indirectly. However, by bringing membership down to the individual level it will be harder for companies to just pay their way into the structure.

For example:

• A company can pay the membership fees of their employees or they can give their employees dedicated time to work on getting their ideas realized inside the community.
• If an employee leaves, he would obviously take with him the "cloud" he has created for himself. This is different to lets say a seat on some ANSI board, which is bound to a specific company.

Why should PHP.net core developers be exempt from the membership fees?

There are reasons for and against this. The reason for this mainly revolve around being able to bootstrap emPHPower to have a large members list form day one. Also PHP.net developers have shown a considerable level of dedication towards PHP already. In that way its just a thank you from the community to give them free accounts

On the other hand, especially due to their dedication these people are likely to be a large group of people that could lead by example by paying the membership fee. In this sense a good compromise might be that PHP.net developers will be optionally allowed to pay the membership fee. If they then do pay the membership its an even stronger message to the rest of the community as to the level of support PHP.net core developers are showing towards emPHPower.

I have not made up my mind either way.

Decision making process

Who decides on what emPHPower does?

At the core things will be bottom up. So as explained above, decisions and actions will be driven by members. The more members who support the action, the more visibility it will get.

On top of that there will likely be some kind of board that will get voted into office for a year. This group of people will do the day to day tasks that are necessary to keep this non profit running. Their decision power will be quite limited, so for big decisions they will probably need to hold some sort of poll in the community.

How will decisions about money be made?

The board can make decisions, but with clear regulations like a cap on money spend for a specific effort. Any amount beyond that (including the yearly budget), has to first be approved by the community.

Furthermore since emPHPower a bottom up organization, there will be ways for the community to allocate ressources. The more members agree with the given investment, the higher the maximum amount that maybe allocated for the given project.

Bootstrapping emPHPower

How will the emPHPower organization be bootstrapped?

The idea is to have a phase of 6-9 months in which members can join for free and begin collaborating on defining how emPHPower should operate. In this phase the founders of emPHPower will act as benevolent dictators. Once a number of proposals have been sufficiently prepared, any member that wishes to vote will be asked to pay the fees for the first 6 months. After a call for vote all members that have payed can vote and the new regulations will go in effect. Likely the new regulations will mandate the creation of some positions that may or may not require direct or indirect vote by the members. Once all positions are filled things will go into business as usual mode as defined by the regulations. I have collected some more thoughts on this in my blog.

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