Allow me to add my 2c to this discussion, mostly out of personal experience with having started, mentored and transferred ownership and control of several open source projects, some of which highly successful and most of which still in existence to this day.
First, let me say that I see value in both sides of the argument: this proposed release is indeed a fork (and that is bad) but it's also injecting new vitality into the project (and that is good). One of the metrics I've used in the past to evaluate the health of open source communities is their abilities to survive their original authors/promoters leaving. DavidH has beent he main contributor for Exhibit (and various other simile widgets like timeline) and his participation is very much reduced. I had a much smaller role in development but a bigger one in project/community management, and my participation is similarly reduced. The principal reason why communities implode after the original authors leave is what I normally think of as "thermal death": without a converging force, entropy kicks in and when it passes a certain threshold, the project dilutes its social capital and fails to convert enough users into development contributions. The process is too diluted to sustain itself and it decays. My understanding of Ryan's strong reaction is a resonation to that perception: David actions are in good faith but represent a clear signal of entropy increase.... and show a path of entropy increase and dilution of cohesion and social capital. The plan to split the release in patches that fix existing broken behaviors from new functionality is wise and a good step forward, but the problems Ryan outlines are real and should be taken very seriously: without an established and meritocratic process for vetting contributions and granting ownership to vested parties, there is no way this project will survive thermal death. Before you think "governance rules" and drafting committees and asking for a grants to foundations to fund various get-togethers around the country to make it happen, let me just save you all that problem and propose you a simple one that would work: 1) use a distributed version control system for contributions where anybody can push their own tree, and the main line pulls from what the stakeholders consider appropriate (by simple email voting, lazy consensus and majority ruling, no veto power). 2) stakeholders can ask new stakeholders to be granted that status by nomination and majority ruling So, if the majority of stakeholders believes that logging every action in every page that embeds exhibit to an MIT server is a worthwhile feature to have, it will be pulled into the main-line and released officially... if not, it stays in a side branch, away from where it can do damage if mis-used or mis-understood. But at least, by virtue of a public process to propose additions to the mainline, there is the possibility for review... which is what David proposal lacks and that is causing Ryan's production engineer spidey sense to tingle. I understand why this will not sound appealing to David: why go from the ability to commit code as needed to a process that is more difficult, time consuming and potentially less appealing for external (and shy) contributors? Because if not this project will splinter in many different "vendor" branches (one as an MIT research platform, one as a Zepheira product, one as a Library of Congress publishing system and so on) and the Exhibit brand will be diluted, users will be confused by the incompatible codebases, the ability to turn their usage into potential contributions will be drastically reduced, along with the potential for each vendor to share maintenance costs with one another. As a result, the ability to promote Exhibit as a funding substrate, software product or publishing system respectively will considerably degrade if unity is not promoted and maintained as a core value. This is why, if I had to pick a side, I would side with Ryan and focusing on increasing sustainability instead of increasing momentum: mostly because a valuable and healthy/sustainable project will find a way to increase its momentum, while a project that increases momentum by splintering to shed inertia will have diluted its social capital with that action, potentially so much that it could go below the threshold that makes the project appealing and find itself slowing down its momentum irreversibly. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SIMILE Widgets" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/simile-widgets?hl=en.
