On 1/23/15, 6:53 AM, "jan i" <j...@apache.org> wrote: > >I agree with everything else you write, but the demand for "only ASF >Members" seems very hard. If I come to ASF with a community and a project, >I really would feel unhappy being cut out of the loop
Time for my weekly musings. Sorry, no oaths and anthems this week. I agree with Jan I. Thinking back only a few years to when I was new to Apache and going through the incubator, if the original PMC was comprised only of seasoned ASF folks, I would have felt more like those ASF folks were my managers and been more passive about learning about Apache because I would expect these authority figures to train me. Sometimes the better way to learn is by doing. IMO, it is better to make folks who really have a stake in the success of the project feel that responsibility. To me, that’s the problem I’ve having with all of these proposals. They seem too “top-down”, like the podling is a baby in need of true incubation, like hand-holding and feeding. Really, a podling is made up of adults and “all" I think you really need is to make it clear to newcomers that there is a different culture at Apache and that you are expected to understand it, exercise it, and propagate it to latecomers in order to become a full Apache project. I just think that coddling newcomers takes the risk of creating newcomers that can’t stand on their own legs. IMO, you want to test the newcomers to make sure they can perform autonomously and proactively. Maybe instead of the name “Incubator” we should call it “University”. Lots of businesses send new employees to a “University” where corporate culture is part of the lessons. But even that is “top-down” like you are expected to go to class. How about “Driving School”? In driving school you drive the car and get advice. The instructor only takes control in an emergency. And the culture around driving, the “unwritten rules of the road” that aren’t in the instruction manual, is part of what you learn while you are doing. New Apache instruction manuals are being written by Marvin and Bertrand et al, so the rest comes down to “How do you teach culture?” I’ve never moved to another country to live, but I would argue that I had to learn a new culture when I left my west coast high school and went to Boston for college. You can write up your culture and folks can read it, but a lot of it just comes from trying it and being corrected as soon as possible, hopefully in a nice way. So let the newcomers drive. Now, how do you make sure there is an instructor in the car, that instructors are paying attention, and are teaching the right rules? If your driving instructor is a New York City cab driver, you would get a decidedly different outcome than if the driving instructor was my mom. I think I’m hearing in these threads that there is too much variance in the instruction at Apache. Culling back to a core that truly gets it and training new instructors might be required if that’s true. In driving school, the instructor in the car has a significant stake in the outcome. He/she truly has “skin in the game”. I don’t see any easy way for our mentors to have the same stake, especially given they are volunteers. In real communities, cultural errors are caught by the villagers being embedded. They see you doing something you shouldn’t take you aside and tell you what you need to do differently. The thing is, there are usually few newcomers and lots of villagers. New projects usually overwhelm the villagers/mentors with new folks. Maybe a solution is even more ASF folks on each podling’s list. Sure that dilutes responsibility, but with volunteers, responsibility is always difficult to require. Volunteer-staffed house-building project coordinators don’t try to find a few volunteers to commit whole days, they try to find dozens of volunteers knowing each might only hammer a few nails before leaving, but collectively things get done. The Incubator has one solution in place already. Certain podling tasks require notification before you get started on them and final approval when you finish. Maybe more podling tasks like report writing and discussing potential committers need to follow the same pattern. Maybe podlings should be encouraged to notify the incubator when the temperature of a discussion rises, or maybe we need a tool that notifies the villagers/incubators/members when any podling thread grows over 10 posts. And if you have the right notifications, you get one other benefit. If a podling doesn’t emit any notifications for a while, you can assume something is wrong there, even if their board report implies differently. So: -Whether there is a separate group called Incubator or anything else to offload the board regarding report collection and review should be purely a decision of load balancing. If the board has time then you don’t need a subcommittee, if not, create one. -That group might be better organized as a subcommittee than a project if it isn’t going to operate like a project -If culture is important, then you need to designate a group of folks who can certify that you “get it”. It could be the ASF members, but I’m not sure all members “get it”. Or maybe it is some smaller group. It could be the current Incubator folks. -Make it clear to newcomers that there is a different culture. I don’t think I see that emphasized when new projects knock on our door. When I came in, I knew there was this thing called meritocracy, but I did not know about the “no hierarchy”, bias towards consensus vs voting, voting rules or source-only-releases and more and that these things were also important. -Consider experimenting with having more casual observers from this group of cultural advisors than having fewer committed ones. -See if required notifications for more things can help keep track of new communities. -Alex
