El miércoles, 22 octu, 2003, a las 06:18 Europe/Madrid, Phil Steitz escribió:
Maybe I am way off base here, but I see the whole community as responsible. The Board and PMCs (relatively stable "authorities") have to exist for legal reasons and to make program-level decisions (including how charters are defined and how community decision-making works); but the responsibility for day to day decisions (such as how to distribute the newsletter) belongs with the community -- especially those who are stepping up to do the work.
I know that it may be naive to assume that the "community" can effectively decide everything and that the discussion/voting process will always lead to consensus. I have seen a few situations where this has failed; but I don't see pushing decisions off to "responsible parties" or "ultimate authoriteies" as any better than letting individuals *take* responsibility and defend their ideas and actions among the community.
Some days ago (I'm swamped with work), there was a discussion in [EMAIL PROTECTED] about how private are private mailing lists in Apache.
I asked about subscription to some pmc mailing lists (private), remembering I had read something Stefano Mazzochi published back in June [1] in his excellent introduction to Apache Membership and its meaning.
There you could read:
all members have access to the entire
history of the foundation, including legal and financial stuff. They can
subscribe to any mailing list, including all PMC lists, the licensing
committee, and even the board mail list.
The discussion settled down slowly, the fact got confirmed. Ken Coar remembered us:
however, this does raise an interesting point -- namely, that the non-member subscribers to some lists (like the non-asf-member pmc members) may not be aware that any asf member can read the archives.
The members who read those lists archives are, of course, bound by the same privacy requirements as the members of the list themselves.
This mail serves to a couple purposes. One is to remember non Apache members in pmc lists that ASF members can see what they post there.
When I said:
Just tell them. I think they are all PMC Chairs are subscribed to board, so it should be easy to tell them there to
and offered a sample mail, Greg Stein replied:
I think your sample is missing some context about why this has come up. If
some non-Member PMC-member read this, they would wonder what the heck is
going on and why they should (or should not) be concerned.
... Just copy it and send it, or give me the ok ,and I'll do it myself.
Who should "give [you] the ok" ?? You're a Member. You should already know
that this is a good thing to send out, and can take the lead on doing so.
What was going on? This is actually the main objective of this email, and why I think it is interesting in the context of Phil's post.
I was looking for public information on XXXXXXXXX(it does not actually matter). Nothing, or barely something could be found about some decision process in public lists.
Actually I could find some information in some pmc lists. And what looked interesting is not what I found there, but the fact that it was not public. Possibly because all people involved in the discussion saw it in three or four lists, they took it as public info in their mind. Actually it was not.
What I have found reading a sample of pmc posts of several pmcs is that 80% to 90% of the posts there should/could be public, and that our decision processes would be simpler and less confusion would arise if at least summaries of the results of the processes are posted publicly.
Unfortunately, not at the information handled there can be public. But I think the volume of a lot of those pmc lists is beginning to be big enough so that people forget to tell those outside of the pmc about decisions.
A place where this is happening is jakarta. More and more of the things that used to come in jakarta-general are now discussed in the pmc list. This is, no doubt, because the PMC has increased a lot in size, but the fact leaves the committers outside of the PMC, which are still most of them, and the community at large, completely outside of the loop.
Another troublesome and interesting case is incubation processes. There are messages going back and forth between the incubator and the relevant pmc to take the project, and quite often the final acceptance decision is not documented anywhere, or barely so. And the process looks obscure from the outside, even when, reading the relevant (private) messages makes the process obvious and non-controversial.
Should most of those processes be held in public? I think public decision processes is crucial to Apache community culture, and switching to committee decision would in the long term damage the community.
Regards
Santiago[1] http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]&msgId=744290
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