Hi Joan, Thank you for such a thoughtful response, very much appreciated. It would take me some time to go over the material you shared. I will certainly come back and ask more questions if I have any.
I would not be attending ApacheCon in Montreal, however a group of Beam community members will be there. Some of them are greatly interested in this discussion, I will encourage them to attend your talk. Ahmet On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 3:03 PM, Joan Touzet <woh...@apache.org> wrote: > Hi Ahmet, > > Thanks for the kind words! > > Our bylaws were established in 2014 after some concern that the ASF > itself didn't have specific enough rules for all of the various types of > decisions our project needed to reach, as well as those rules being hard > to parse and locate on the websites. We wanted to make it easier for > contributors, committers and the PMC to understand how we intend to > run the CouchDB project, and to have a clear reference for the future. > > As a community, we were in a time of great change. Two major code > contributions were on their way into the code base that would result in > CouchDB 2.0 after significant refactoring and some backward > incompatibility. There was dissent within our development community > about the direction of the product: were we primarily a "two-tier" > development environment, or a database with an HTTP API and JSON data > format? And we would soon be changing over from Subversion to Git, > something our developers really wanted, but ASF Infrastructure was slow > to adopt and embrace. We had to fight long and hard, and became the > first project in the ASF to be allowed to use git officially. As part > of this process we decided to move from Commit-Then-Review (CTR) to > Review-Then-Commit (RTC), based on the popularity of the GitHub Pull > Request model. This allows us to keep the master branch of our repo > always release-able, something we struggled with for years prior. > > The discussion started here: > > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/f824e8d3c490460c739f6d769e1de0 > 2b24bf09fa2863e88116cb0577@1398714830@%3Cdev.couchdb.apache.org%3E > > And continued here: > > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/40d49b259170f43c0908706c09cf5b > 16e703365b7989ba79a1b8d9e6@1399489677@%3Cdev.couchdb.apache.org%3E > > We then had a small amendment to the bylaws to correct an oversight: > > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/e270c4fbb4374ae98ed73583ff9ff5 > d6a1660374f7a8084c1d795ea8@1399528340@%3Cdev.couchdb.apache.org%3E > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/03fdda4b8ec8cd7926f95daa5dfe94 > b7af5c568d39abda2e75918d87@1405991529@%3Cdev.couchdb.apache.org%3E > > We have had, to my knowledge, only one other modification to the bylaws > since then, which was to clarify how API deprecations will be handled > in future versions by requiring their announcement on our dev@ list > (actual commits only go to notifications@): > > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/aa6d6ace4be652f3b4bb380b92ee92 > 48d84dece7fd3281406446ca05@%3Cdev.couchdb.apache.org%3E > > Finally, we also discussed, voted on, and adopted our Code of Conduct, > drawn from those written by many similar communities around the open > source world. A few short months later, that CoC would be adopted by > the ASF at large. The CoC is not a cudgel, it's a way for us to ensure > that the values that brought the team together in the first place > persist past the founders' direct involvement in the project. > > Not sure it's worth rehashing the CoC discussion now that it's ASF-wide, > but if you are interested in the gory details, here they are: > > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/18f059c0582a4700992cbb302c2539 > d235215226cad69d82abdc9444@1398713334@%3Cdev.couchdb.apache.org%3E > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/0cf65d2715348229f87e4b572d1765 > 802857755fab94ff9d8cd1924f@1400368799@%3Cdev.couchdb.apache.org%3E > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/c3f5e3a462a0ab1ded3af5eec0ac37 > 4aa647f3c1e55e7cd7e6ba8d5d@1400531457@%3Cdev.couchdb.apache.org%3E > > And the vote thread: > > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/f1621bfe5bbf4dbf6e799e338e440a > fb58cf58b6b91bc42a9f7622b4@1407028730@%3Cdev.couchdb.apache.org%3E > > I think investment in community pays off over the long haul. Take the > time to discuss and debate the reasons for your bylaws. One key point > for us was: how would vetos work? Did we feel right about a single > person being able to veto a technical code change or release? And in > what situations would the PMC be empowered to override the community > (though in general, they don't ever want to do that!) Discuss how the > ASF CoC can and should be used in your community to ensure good faith, > positive discussions. It shouldn't be seen as a scary document, but > something that helps remind people to be nice to each other, and to > work towards the betterment of the project. The discussions together > will highlight the areas in which you need work, and should spawn a > series of actions that continuously improve your community. > > I'll be speaking at this year's ApacheCon in Montreal about other > communities from which the ASF maybe can learn a thing or two. If > you're able to attend, I'd love you to come! The talk is on Thursday. > If you're not coming, the talk should be on YouTube a month or two > later. > > If you have any lingering questions about our bylaws, or the process > by which we adopted them, please feel free to ask. > > -Joan "good rules make good collaborators" Touzet > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Ahmet Altay" <al...@google.com.INVALID> > > To: dev@couchdb.apache.org > > Sent: Friday, August 10, 2018 4:27:33 PM > > Subject: Questions about CouchDB bylaws > > > > Hi all, > > > > There was a recent discussion on Apache Beam related to adding bylaws > > to > > that project. I wanted to look around to other projects with > > published > > bylaws and found CouchDB bylaws [1] to be a well written document. I > > would > > like to learn from your experience. > > > > Would you be able to share some context about how did you come to > > this > > version? What kind of considerations you had? What was tradeoffs? And > > how > > the community built consensus around it? > > > > Please feel free to point me to any existing notes. > > > > Thank you, > > Ahmet > > > > [1] http://couchdb.apache.org/bylaws.html > > > >
