Re: Hierachy of Decision making in a community

[David E. Jones]

Chris,

Are you implying that I might be the BD for OFBiz?


If there is something potentially confusing or misleading I try to comment on 
that too, which was the case with OFBIZ-81 and my intent there was mostly to 
make sure the others involved with that (as I really wasn't involved with the 
development) did not get distracted by your comments. My hope is that those 
involved spent very little time on this distraction and were able to go about 
their efforts without worrying about it.

I'm not saying that your comments were without value, otherwise I would not 
have bothered to comment. I am saying that for this particular issue they were 
a distraction and an encouragement to go in a direction that I though was 
simply bad for the project, so I asserted my opinion.

In reality aside from my involvement with the initial design, direction, and 
"recruiting" (mostly facilitation) for OFBiz in the early stages of the project 
and my work to get it into the ASF family, I'm just another consultant with more 
financial obligations than resources who is hanging out in this little world of OFBiz (or 
rather, Apache OFBiz) trying catch scraps as they fall from the tables of larger projects 
based on the software.

I'm as powerless to assert control over the project as anyone else. In fact I 
have the same power as anyone else to participate and introduce new resources 
and possibilities for the project. Well, in reality I have far less power than 
many because of other liabilities that take up so much of my time. The only 
difference is that I've done this enough times over the years with OFBiz that 
it is a fairly normal mode of operating and therefore has a better chance of 
being accepted. Aside from that, there is nothing special about the time or 
money I put into the project or the opinions I express.

The real truth is I can only take credit for a minor part of OFBiz, and I'm 
only involved to a limited extent. Without the efforts of others, especially 
Andy Zeneski in the earlier years and Si Chen and Jacopo Cappellato in the last 
couple of years, OFBiz would simply not be what it is today. This discussion 
probably wouldn't even be happening because it probably would not have even 
been of interest to someone in your position. ;)

-David


Chris Howe wrote:

That is rather flattering, though probably not entirely correct. I'm more of an administrative assistant to the community than anything else these days... especially with the ASF effort. On the technical side if you look at the commit history over recent months you'll see that I'm responsible for very few of them in reality. Much of what I do on the technical side is review commits and issues and comments for potential problems or opportunities that might go unnoticed, and comment on them as I can.

Thank you Ashish, that's great reading material.  I
particularly enjoyed these two sections:

http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/setting-tone.html#prevent-rudeness

http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/social-infrastructure.html#benevolant-dictator-qualifications

For those keeping tabs, this post is admitingly,
trolling - trying to elicit a response.  Most previous
messages were offering criticism and more importantly,
solutions.

--- Ashish Vijaywargiya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

David,
 Here is the book "Producing Open Source Software by

Karl Fogel" link that is freely available........ http://producingoss.com/ Regards

 Ashish Vijaywargiya
"David E. Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

BJ Freeman wrote:

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

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.

whether a patch is ready or not.

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


                
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