Dear OFBiz Community Member, I herewith take the opportunity to inform you about the obligation on the OFBiz PMC to inform the ASF Board about how we as a community are doing. These reports can be found at: https://cwiki.apache.org/OFBADMIN/asf-board-reports.html.
Following the project since it came out of incubation in 2006 and contributing since august 2008 I believe that the OFBiz PMC doesn't communicate as well as it could and should. Looking back through old email I noticed that only in 2009 there was a reference to ASF Board reports. Not informing the community (through mailing lists) about upcoming reports and not communicating that a new report has been submitted is an oversight that can easily be remitted. Informing the community that new reports are pending or submitted should be one of the obligations of the OFBiz PMC to the community. Looking at the upcoming Board report (intended June 2012, found here: https://cwiki.apache.org/OFBADMIN/asf-board-report-2012-06-draft.html) I find that it should contain more than just a statement that R10.04.02 has been released and a lot of copy-pasting of the previous report. Please read the report. Under the heading of Infrastructure I believe that it should mentioned that no automated building and testing has taken place since Jan 2012 on the underlying system of buildbot. And that uptake by the INFRA community is slow. Under the heading of Community and Project I believe that it should state the progress regarding the roadmap. We can communicate more on how we are moving ahead with code. I also believe that it should mention (under the heading of Community and Project) that although interactions on user and dev mailling list remain high, the number of interacting PMC members and Committers is dwindling. Of the 16 PMC members and 22 committers on the list only a handful participate in user questions and developer issues. Even the last voting on the release of 10.04.02 attracted no more than 4 PMC members to vote. And that I find very alarming. The project deserves more actively participating PMC Members and Committers. In stead of having an active participation in the strengthening and expanding the community and enhancing/improving OFBiz, we are on a road of contraction (moving code out of OFBiz in the hope/trust that if important enough it will be picked up by another community), which will lead to even less participation in the OFBiz community via mailing lists and product development. I find that disturbing. We currently have about 640 unaddressed issues referenced in JIRA, of which more than half are registered with a classification of mayor or higher impact. It shows that, apart from the handful of Commiters working on issues not referenced in JIRA, we have serious issues to deal with. These issues should be addressed within the community and mentioned to ASF Board. If we do not address the issues the project is facing it might come to a point that the viability of this project is questioned. I believe we (as a community) don't want that. So, I invite you to share your thoughts on how this community is doing, what can be improved and what should be reported to the ASF Board. Sincerely yours, Pierre Smits
