I am a bit concerned about Hop's use of Chat. To be clear, Apache projects use chat rooms (e.g. Slack, IRC) and they are a good way to get questions answered quickly and to build a sense of community.
First, I am concerned about the lack of a public archive. People who want to read the chat have to first sign up. (Hopefully, I am mistaken. If so, please post a link to the archive on the site.) Second, let's fix the branding on Chat. Currently it is under the project-hop.org domain, and the project is called 'hop'. No 'apache' in sight. Third, at Apache we have a rule 'if it doesn't happen on dev it didn't happen', i.e. don't make decisions off the mailing list. The conversation on chat is generally pretty benign, but I saw one exception: this one from Matt Casters: > I would like to set a goal of having a substantial set of integration tests > for 1.0. The bare minimum seems to be all the popular most often used > transforms and actions. I know that this far exceeds what P5o and > Kettle had but stability is really important. That discussion should have been on the dev list. Last, according to the latest incubator report [1], a lot more people are signed up for chat than for the dev list (122 vs 22). I am concerned that, with such a disparity in membership, Chat will become the de facto place that people discuss important matters. I think the solution is to increase the number of people on the dev list, and to continue to drive significant discussions onto off of Chat and onto dev@. Julian [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INCUBATOR/January2021
