Thank you for your response, I would suggest this be edited and publish
with other documents.
BTW the Vol 1 and 2 is the data books, got to know what I am talking
about, before making decisions. :)
David E. Jones sent the following on 7/14/2006 9:19 PM:
BJ Freeman wrote:
If this is truly a community, and there are people involved that
really have knowledge about something, What is the Hierarchy of
Decisions based on the ASF way?
Or is this a vialed attempt to look like a community with only one
persons Making the decisions.
From what I have seen certain individuals do commit and contribute,
without a problem. So this is not a one man show.
What seems to be the questions is the guidelines for making decisions.
it is truly a community when all seem to have access to the guidelines.
I think getting a set of guidelines for all to have access to would
alleviate the pressure felt when there is an disagreement.
I'm not sure what sort of guidelines would be applicable here. Because
of human nature the possible problems arising are nearly limitless...
Still, I guess the basic structure is simple. The committers make the
decisions. Of course, part of the responsibility of being a committer
(as described in the OFBiz Committers Roles and Responsibilities page,
linked to below), is facilitating community interaction and
contributions, so a lot of this "decision making" is just review,
feedback, and a yes or no decision on whether a patch is ready or not.
So no, committers don't drive everything that happens in the project,
but they are the filter that everything goes through to try to keep the
project clean and vital.
I'll talk more about the already established guidelines below.
I have purchased the Vol 1 and II and will begin reading them this
winter, maybe on the train ride to Portland.
Which volumes are these? I'm not aware of any books (especially specific
to OFBiz) that talk about decision making guidelines like this...
Actually there are some books about managing open source projects that
are interesting, like:
"Producing Open Source Software" by Karl Fogel
Note that this is a very general book and is not necessarily about the
ASF way or the way things are done in OFBiz. It is good general
commentary and I've found it interesting and helpful. It is available
for download (I have a PDF sitting on my machine), but I don't remember
exactly where I downloaded.
So if there are other documents that are involved, I will purchase or
read those.
Just point me to the documents that define the framework for decision
making on this project.
The best documents about this for ASF are on the ASF site itself. There
are quite a few things to read through in different places, but a good
place to start is:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html
The whole page is good, but the Meritocracy section is especially
important.
One things to keep in mind with OFBiz is that much of the software is
business automation oriented and not technical in nature. You'll see a
lot of stuff written about Linux and other very technically oriented
projects and those are good places to start, but I've found that certain
variations on those are very important for more business oriented open
source projects, especially the very few such projects that are
community rather than corporate driven. So, in other words, read lightly
and consider it input to be refined and then applied.
There are some OFBiz specific pages that have recently been established
that cover these sorts of guidelines, so here they are:
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/OFBiz+Committers+Roles+and+Responsibilities
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/OFBiz+Contributors+Best+Practices
A good source of information, BTW, is just glancing at the mailing list
messages every so often. These documents, for example, and the direct
result of discussions on the dev list and were announced there as well.
-David
