On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 8:37 AM, Benedikt Ritter <brit...@apache.org> wrote: > ...I hadn't heard about mailing lists. It always > felt clumsy to me. I know github and twitter....
The one rule that I don't want to change at Apache is that all important discussions and all decisions of a project have to happen on the project's dev mailing list. Without this it's impossible to keep the oversight on our projects (which is part of the Board of Director's mission) and people who join projects would first have to find out where the discussions happen, and if they're scattered it takes ages for someone to get up to speed with how a project collaborates. That's only the dev list however - if projects want to use different tools for supporting their users that's perfectly possible.There are far superior systems today for questions and answers (as opposed to open discussions), like the stack overflow model. IIUC the problem with http://stackoverflow.com/ is that they own whatever people write there, and with our long-term vision we want to own our content. Creating a clone of that at Apache sounds like a cool challenge for a bright 29-years old, don't you think? ;-) Using large mailing lists requires some effort, I wrote a blog post about this a while ago, at http://blogs.adobe.com/opendev/2014/05/28/large-mailing-lists-survival-guide/ - like any tool, you need to tame them to be efficient. In summary, I would be opposed to relaxing the "if it didn't happen on the dev list it didn't happen" rules for important projects discussions and for project decisions, but our projects have lots of freedom for everything else. -Bertrand (BTW I'm 52 and I do use Twitter and those other things...a bit)
