On 12/29/2014 01:45 PM, Andrew Purtell wrote:
There are honorary and practical reasons why a project may view the PMC Chair
and the project leader as one in the same.
Honorary: The community elevated one member as lead and assigned the Chair role
out of respect.
Practical: The PMC Chair has the power to dissolve the PMC, and is an officer of the
Foundation. Nobody else on the project has such power nor indemnification.
"Secretary" as a term does not adequately encompass that.
That's all well and good, however:
1) I'm not aware of even a single time that the PMC chair has actually
unilaterally dissolved the PMC, and I think the board would have serious
objections if that were to actually happen, as it would indicate pretty
serious community failure.
2) ASF projects don't have project leads. Sure, a project may, at one
time or another, have a person that is clearly at the forefront of
decision making, but to designate them a project lead indicates
dysfunction in a collaboration-based structure.
This seems a tad of a diversion from the topic, but definitely worth
mentioning.
On Dec 29, 2014, at 6:46 AM, Rich Bowen <rbo...@rcbowen.com> wrote:
On 12/23/2014 03:34 PM, sebb wrote:
Flex had three great mentors, but to expect them to be the PMC Chair on
graduation would have been problematic. They were great mentors because
they had lots of experience from their work on other Apache projects, and
thus didn’t have time to stay active on a new TLP, plus they really
weren’t users or developers of the technology, just our coaches on the
Apache Way, and thus wouldn’t be good Chair candidates as they weren’t as
invested in the technology. But they did stick around on at least the
private@ lists and continue to do so even 2 years after graduation where
we consult them on occasion. To require that a mentor be an active
contributor limits the kinds of technologies that can come to Apache to
only those who can interest someone with a lot of spare cycles.
IMO, the mentors job is to teach, not to lead.
The job of the PMC chair is almost entirely administrative.
They are the link between the board and the PMC and their main role is
to ensure the board gets timely reports and to feed back comments from
the board.
If a PMC is relying on the chair to drive it forward technically, then
I think something has gone wrong with the PMC.
Indeed. Big +1 on this.
There are some projects that I've been watching lately where the PMC chair is
viewed as the project lead, and that has a number of problems that go along
with it. The PMC chair is a secretary, whose job is to file the right
paperwork. A *hugely* important role, but not a technical lead role.
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Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com - @rbowen
http://apachecon.com/ - @apachecon
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