To me a lot of the problem stems from the fact that the reports are misdirected- instead of informing the board about the activities of the IPMC, it tells them about the podling's activities, which doesn't scale properly.
We should be reporting to the board about OUR work, not the work of the podlings. Podlings should only be brought in for a few specific examplesto mention. That's the first thing to correct. Once we start reporting about the crap WE did, then we can start figuring out all the crap that's not getting done by mentors who aren't participating. It doesn't matter that there are lots of well-intentioned but otherwise useless people mentoring projects, the fact is that they only harm the org by not prodding these projects along a graduation path or funneling them towards the exit door. Part of how they manage to get away with that is that we pretend its important to a podling to create a sustainable community around itself, which is something most of them have no control over. That is the reason for the long bouts of stalling on many levels, we need to do the sane thing and drop that bit of pretense, and yes even graduating projects that haven't necessarily met the silly developer diversity requirements- rules are not appropriate here, only very fuzzy benchmarks. WE are responsible for evaluating the progress of our podlings, ALL of them, and clutch can help us do that at a basic level as a group. But we need to figure out, quickly, how to change the review process for podling reports in a scalable way without us all being burnt out all at once. I think the review needs to take place over a few days, on the podling's own dev lists, by 3 IPMC members actively voting on them. We can still collate the podling reports on the wiki, but the report we hand to the board should come from us, and it should be the product of those reviews. We can do this wiki-style if we want to, or just have Noel poll this list for "mentor comments" to be included in the report. A quick scan of the podling lists wrt those report votes should be sufficient to determine if a podling needs more IPMC representation, and can be done by Noel or collectively if we'd like to start doing more cross-checking. WDYT? ----- Original Message ----- > From: Benson Margulies <bimargul...@gmail.com> > To: general@incubator.apache.org > Cc: > Sent: Monday, November 21, 2011 7:42 PM > Subject: Re: should podlings have informal chairs? > > On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Sam Ruby <ru...@intertwingly.net> wrote: >> On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 6:13 PM, Benson Margulies > <bimargul...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Sam, >>> >>> Do you see any validity in my theory that the ipmc is so large and >>> diffuse as to be directionless? >> >> I don't see that as a necessary consequence. The ASF is large and >> diffuse, yet each month we pretty consistently get 6+ Directors to >> review and sign off on each report. The board is careful to not set >> technical direction, but we do create and track action items, and work >> to make sure that the individual PMCs are self-governing and get the >> help that they need from the relevant board committees. > > Compare, if you would, the board of six to the ipmc. There aren't six, > or sixteen, ipmc members who feel it's their job to review every PPMC > report before the whole business goes to the board. There's a chair, > who due to his volunteer status like the rest of us, shows more or > less engagement with the goings-on on this mailing list at different > times. > > The ipmc more or less delegates to the mentors, and passes the PPMC > reports up to the board, with not much digestive activity in between. > In this sense I guess I'm trying to agree with you, but I wonder how > to get a giant committee of people, most of whom signed up just to > mentor one project, to actually step up and exercise more oversight. > Of course we've got a few people like Sebb who try to stay on top of > everything. > > Since there are only six board members, they all know that they, > themselves, have to read this stuff and think about it. If there were > 106, I doubt that anything would get attended to unless a subset were > somehow tasked. So I suppose that I'm trying to float the idea that, > somehow, less than the full ipmc needs to focus. I suppose that the > committee could create a category of meta-mentor, and people who sign > up for that role would be signing up to read all the reports and > perhaps even look over the shoulders a bit of the projects. > > Should I believe > http://people.apache.org/committers-by-project.html#incubator-pmc that > there are 878 ipmc members, or is this some sort of ldap artifact? > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
