I have been involved in side conversations to try to build a bit of unity among our community and would like to propose this as a statement of what we are doing:
Apache Mahout is moving immediately to a faster execution model. The first of these is Spark. Outside contributions are always encouraged. As a bit of commentary, it is clear that what the committers are working on is Spark and it is clear that Spark will be the first new platform for Mahout. It is also clear that there are non-committers (the 0xdata crew for one) who are working with the community to extend Mahout beyond just Spark. As a statement of where the community is *right* now, however, I don't think we need to say much more than that we encourage contributions. Sound fair? Correct?
