On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Mattmann, Chris A (3980) < chris.a.mattm...@jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
> >Regardless of whether it is an explicit requirement to have some specific > >level of diversity, there is a requirement that the group demonstrate > >community building. > > I'm also sympathetic to this: you can see my thread here where originally > I didn't > think much had been going on until I explicitly checked the lists and went > through > the archives and saw ~7 IIRC PPMC members/committers added since entering > [1]. That's > community building regardless of what affiliation those new members came > from. > > The other metrics and statistics (health of the mailing lists/open > discussions have > been increasing; releases have been made, etc.) are all there and outlined > in [1]. As I read the private list, there has been absolutely no effort at adding committers until last month when the topic of graduation has come up. There is no substantive discussion on the list of the potential committers, but simply rather perfunctory +1 votes. In reading the thread about whether there should be/is a diversity requirement, I come to a bit of a different conclusion as well. What I see in the discussion is that the participants seem to agree that - there should not be a simple count-based diversity measure because this would dissuade valuable commercial contributions - the chance/likelihood of project failure due to a dominant commercial contributor pulling out should not be considered since project dormancy or retirement isn't a bad thing. Better to try and fail than never try. - there is clear recognition of the risk of commercial companies inventing a project not so much because of a desire to build community but rather as a marketing maneuver. - there is no mention of the problems that have arisen in the Hadoop groups relative to use of groups and Apache trademarks for marketing purposes. I don't want to impute motives to actions since I cannot know what others hold in their hearts, but I don't see evidence of efforts to really build the community. There was one meat-space meetup a year ago. There have been a few presentations of what Tez is. I do see a fair number of public statements of the form "Tez is Hortonworks answer to Impala" or "The future of Hadoop runs on Tez", most of which seem to come out of Hortonworks' marketing department. In looking at the dev list back to September of last year, I see a large number of procedural messages (votes, results, release mechanics), a few user questions (NPE in such and so, how do I install) and very few design discussions. There was one thread last November about combiners, another in January about map parallelism, and one more in March about reducer parallelism. To me this looks a lot like a project where all design discussions are occurring off-list. What I would like to see would include - a strong effort on the part of Tez to bring all design and implementation discussions to the list, - continuous community engagement efforts such as weekly hangouts in different timezones to help new contributors understand what is happening technically in the project in an interactive setting - lots of public talks focussed on how outsiders can contribute and how the design works - cross posting on related projects offering cross pollination opportunities. Such related groups might be Drill, Optiq, Tajo and Spark. These postings would say things like "how could you guys help us with Tez" or "Tez has this and such, would that be helpful to you guys". - inviting contributors from related projects to give technical presentations in the context of Tez Now, my searches have been fairly cursory and could have missed important activities, but I have a bit of a hard time believing that I have missed major efforts along these lines. Based on this evidence, it really does look to me like Tez is a purely commercial development masquerading as an Apache community. I agree that superficial diversity metrics are counter-productive, but I also assert that there isn't any obvious evidence of serious community building here and there is significant evidence that building community isn't even the point of the project. That *is* a substantive issue relative to graduation.
