Hi, The ASF members are getting ready to elect the next board of the foundation, and I am one of the candidates running in the election. Since the board makes decisions that affect also the larger Apache community I wanted to publish my position statement also with all of you on commun...@. Feel free to ask questions (publicly or in private) if something's not covered below or not clear enough. This is a "release early" version. :-)
I've been an Apache committer for a bit over four years now. During that time I've made about 3k commits, submitted nearly 4k issue comments, and sent more than 4k emails to 59 public Apache mailing lists. In other words, this is an environment where I thrive. I want to help make sure that others can have as much fun here as I'm having. The good people at root@ know me from the frequent account requests I keep sending their way, and one of my main motivations for leading the Git effort has been to empower people who've not yet earned traditional committership. If elected, I hope to continue this work on a higher level by helping guide the foundation so that it remains open to new people and ideas and becomes an even better place for us all to work in. I don't yet have much financial, legal or management experience, but I'm hoping to learn from more experienced fellow board and foundation members as needed. I see the Incubator not only as a way for us to teach the Apache Way to new projects, but also as a way for us to constantly challenge our practices and to learn as an organization. Sometimes this can be painful (remember the Maven repository vote on gene...@incubator), but such debates and the possible related changes to status quo will ultimately make us stronger. As an active developer and PMC chair I often interact with many of the foundation-wide committees, but so far I haven't been too interested in actually joining them. I'm no legal eagle or marketing wizard, and my inputs to concom and infra are fairly limited in scope. I expect this situation to continue if I get elected to the board. My main questions to these committees would be how their work benefits our projects and contributors, and what foundation resources they need to do that work. The tough part that falls on the board is then to decide how to distribute limited resources like our money and the staff it pays for. The current board has done a great job in coming up with a real budget for the foundation, though I am concerned about the heavy increase in expenses. We are introducing a lot of new costs and the next board will need to carefully review the results and adjust the next budget accordingly. In the worst case we may even need to adjust things mid-term if the projected income turns out to be too optimistic. There's been some recent debate about the role of marketing and PR for the ASF. I've seen how our paid professional help has benefited the PRC and the projects that have asked for help with their PR activities. So in general I think it's a good idea to spend a part of our income to this. However, the level and focusing of this resourcing has so far not been very well justified or at least understood, so I would ask the PRC to better outline what they are doing and how those efforts benefit the foundation and our projects. One final note: As a relative newcomer I still cringe whenever I encounter another private or closed mailing list at Apache. Our projects live and breathe openness and transparency, but the foundation-wide work is still mostly done behind closed doors. In some cases there are good reasons for privacy, but I reject it as a general rule. I won't be calling for any unilateral changes in list policy, but I will be asking for the various committees to justify their use of private forums. On a similar note, I am sending this position statement also to the community@ list as I see no need for or point in not sharing my opinions with the larger Apache community. Affiliations: I'm about to marry a girl who thinks that my opinions in many Apache debates are totally wrong. ;-) Oh, and I work as a developer for Day Software in Switzerland, where I currently live as an expat. PS. I am not particularly interested in taking on any additional officer hats beyond my current VP, Jackrabbit one. BR, Jukka Zitting --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org
