On 12/2/05, Martin Cooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > IMO, what this tells us is the Commons isn't scaling, and that doesn't > surprise me at all. In the "old days", there were a *lot* fewer components. > Right now, I count 35 components in Proper and 9 more active components in > the Sandbox (excluding the ones Henri is about to make dormant). That is a > lot of stuff! Very few people, if any, are going to keep tabs on all of it, > and most are likely to only track a handful, if that. > > When Commons was much smaller, the community was much more integrated, in > that there was more overlap between the pieces (people-wise, not code-wise), > and so we all watched each others' backs. We're no longer in that state. > > The inability to scale, is, in my opinion, an issue the ASF as a whole is > also facing. Unfortunately, as with Commons, I don't have any good ideas. > Other than to consciously stop growing, that is, but that doesn't appear to > be a popular direction.
[long reply...sorry] Yep. It's my belief that Commons represents the ASF in microcosm, so trying to find solutions in Commons is a) easier than the whole ASF and b) useful to finding the whole ASF problem. I see two directions: 1) Hope a few more projects move out of Jakarta, then promote every Commons component to Jakarta subprojects and revolutionise Jakarta with some Commons concepts. It doesn't solve the problems, but it does accept that the components are increasingly being held up on the shoulders of 1 committer each, and makes us solve it at a Jakarta level, not a Commons level. 2) Reinvigorate ourselves as a community. The lip service is that we're all Commons committers and not individual component committers, but the reality is that not one of us is interested in 43+ components. We need to accept that and adapt. So I think we'd end up at 2) eventually even if 1) happens :) -- So how can we rejuvenate a community without the mantra that we don't have focus? a) Work together. I don't mean that in a hippy peacenik way. I mean actually work together. We need to get a plan for the future of each component and then form groups attacking each target, but not at the same time. So Lang 2.2 might be held up because 3 of us need to work on Collections 2.2. Etc. b) Increase ease of bringing people into the community. Three problems to hit. 1) Encouraging people to get involved (it's hard). 2) Educating people. 3) Communication noise. b-1) is always hard. We encourage this mostly by being open and by broadcasting a sense of enjoyment. Another trick is to leave the easy jobs; don't gobble up easy fun bits (which is hard, they're fun :) ). b-2) is about making the information easier to find. We've a lot of it on the site etc, but we need to take the water more to the horse's mouth. So collating it into a single document etc is my aim. b-3) The mailing list is noisy. There are noisier out there, and it's nowhere near as noisy as it used to be, but increased components, and increased committers will mean it'll be noisier than ever. It's hard to see solutions here. SVN commit messages and Bugzilla messages are important, but so is not being accused of denial-of-service attacks :) One thought I had is to have a commons-sandbox-dev@ as well (Robert -1'd it when we talked on IRC :) ). c) Martin said it above. "Very few are going to keep tabs on it". We need a few people to keep tabs on it :) Either by having very few who look at it all, or by using a hierarchy (ie grouping components). The board do this now, individual board members are tasked with following up on a project's report. d) Homogeneity. We may find we should decrease the independence of the components. They're pretty similar already, but I'm thinking that we could simplify the website a lot by moving away from Maven and having a Commons site, instead of individual Commons Xxx sites. This has a few advantages. It brings us together as a community more, it simplifies deploys that change the site, and it should make things a fair bit easier for readers of the site too. --- To make it all fun, we have to do this without turning it into a monotonous workplace. Hen --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
