Amen, brother! If it's not checked into the website, it doesn't count as documentation that's actually useful to most people.

Being more successful (and we've certainly gotten better) at getting sufficient consensus on the right way to do something and then clearly writing it down once at a stable URL would be a huge win for all sorts of our processes.

- Shane, who himself is often guilty of answering the question on email and failing to do the right thing to update the doc and point to that as the proper (and permanent URL'd) answer

On 2011-11-24 10:18 AM, Joe Schaefer wrote:
Coordination problems (getting everyone here on the same page)
require community documentation and constant pointers to said
documentation in order to be fully resolved.

Whenever we find ourselves making contradicting statements over
time, the healthy thing to do is to put together such a document
on the wiki or on the site that explains what happened and how
we resolved it.


Simply referring to past emails here is inconclusive at best
unless they are comments from the chair.

YMMV


----- Original Message -----
From: Benson Margulies<bimargul...@gmail.com>
To: general@incubator.apache.org
Cc:
Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2011 10:14 AM
Subject: Does Apache Have a 'Rule' Problem, or does the Incubator sometimes 
just make it look that way?

When the hot air manufacturers start ragging on us, one of the usual
tags that they paint is 'rules' and 'bureaucracy'. If you read
general@, you will see a fairly regular occurrence that feeds this
perception.

Someone poses a question about NOTICE files, or IP, or release structure.

If they are lucky, they get 3 disagreeing responses in short order.
Why lucky? Because that gives them a clue that perhaps none of them
are the right answer. If they are unlucky, they get a one answer,
confidently worded. And then they put in hours of work based on that
answer.

Time passes. A release, or even a graduation vote arrives. Suddenly,
some crusty veteran arrives on the scene to tell them that what
they've done is wrong, or inadequate, or purple.

This is not precisely wonderful from a PR standpoint.

What can we do as a PMC to improve this?

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