On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 11:08 PM, Martijn Dashorst <martijn.dasho...@gmail.com> wrote: > If a community meets all the criteria, but hasn't discovered a new > committer (or two) by itself, is the community ready for graduation?
Potentially, yes. Likely, no :-) > If not, how can we—mentors— nudge the community to focus on this > thing, without it becoming an exercise in "checking the check marks"? You can do something like this every quarter or so: --- To: $podling-priv...@incubator.apache.org Subject: any new committer material? (...) Has anybody identified any contributors that they think might be ready for committer-ship? Also are there any people you imagine might be ready "soon" if they continue their current contributions? (...) --- Really no need to refer to obligation or process or checkboxes. Simply asking the question will make people think about it. For many developers its still a bit of scary thought that they have to evaluate others in this way, but it is something you learn quickly. In my experience the first time you try this, the "apache newbies" in the group usually won't really speak up, but among mentors you can still have those kinds of conversations on the mailing list. Teach through example. I distinctly remember a thread along those lines on the harmony mailing list every other month or so, and I'd say that it worked very well. Come to think of it, I think harmony started with _just_ mentors on the PPMC, and no other committers. That worked out well -- because the community got into a pattern of growth immediately -- just about everyone on the PPMC got there by explicitly getting voted onto it. Another thing that can work is to "lower the barrier" and try and allow for the babiest of steps. For example you could have a ppmc-private potential-committer-watchlist.txt file in SVN which people can edit to add their thoughts on who is "worth watching", which is a bit less of a statement than "ooh this person should become a committer" so its easier to say. You'll probably quickly see a "piling on" where other people will agree with such thoughts, slowly dissipating the vacuum and re-inforcing each others confidence in people. Of course, you do need active contributors in the first place to add in. The evangelism and outreach parts of community building take more effort. I like to follow the "Henri school of community building" -- most important is to talk about what you're doing. You might even want to do what feels like over-talk. Example: http://blog.generationjava.com/roller/bayard/entry/first-work-of-the-vacation-commons-cli-12 Write things in blogs, in comments on blogs, in forums, on twitter, on community mailing lists, on your own mailing lists. Etc etc. Encouraging "outreach" behavior is harder, and I think the people that do it really well are also rare. Harmony as an example again had some very active mentors that did a lot of that stuff, and the community watched and adopted the successful behavior. Wicket was fortunate enough to have a very energetic leader already and so I think it didn't really much nudging :-) sorry for the rant I hope it helps you anyway :-) cheers, - Leo --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
