Hi ComDev PMC and other interested folks, From time to time, I hear someone suggest ComDev or its lists as a potential target for a foundation-wide activity that affects current committers. However, I've always thought of ComDev as being focused on "those that are not here yet", rather than those that are - as the monthly report starts, "The Community Development PMC is responsible for helping people become involved with Apache projects."
Some roughly related discussion was held in in April 2013 [1] at Ross' initiation. However, it's not clear to me whether there was any decision taken in the end. If I look over the archives since, it's related to mentoring, GSoC, small events and ApacheCon, with one exception being a large release cadence discussion - which seems to confirm my expectation. The current composition of the PMC also seems to reflect people with that sort of expertise. Possibly it's just my personal bugbear, but my concern with sending traffic to a list that doesn't feel empowered to act on it is that it often ends up in discussion with very little decision making. In addition to this list, ComDev stewards commun...@apache.org, but that is much less frequently used now. I feel like the ASF is seeing a pattern where we need something like "committer relations", that can focus on providing resources and assistance to any committer, while not interfering with individual project boundaries. I'm willing to take up that initiative with others interested - but also quite happy to acknowledge it might be more overhead than value if existing groups can address that need. The first thing I wanted to do was clarify whether ComDev already feels like it has this responsibility in whole or part. So, my questions are: - have I read ComDev's scope correctly, or should it be expanded to include resources for current committers? - regardless of scope, how does the PMC feel about its lists being used to reach out to committers for discussion or updates? - what does the PMC see as the current purpose of commun...@apache.org vs this list? Thanks for indulging me :) Cheers, Brett [1] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/community-dev/201304.mbox/%3CCAKQbXgDL55M9sBXigm8Wmwgk7K0hVGtWEOrCTVWfQ9EgthG%2B3A%40mail.gmail.com%3E
