Yes, this has been mulled dozens of times over the years, and this "if it didn't happen on mailing list it didn't happened at all" is the bottom line. Note; the maturity model doesn't mention mailing lists, other than footnote 11 talking about what happens outside public space.
However, one person thinking and writing something to said list, does this thinking and writing "off line". Likewise, 2 people could be thinking and writing such thing to said list, and I would argue that its quality could be much better (both technically as well as communicative). So, it is not the "happens off-line" that is really the springing point, it is how the thinking is brought to the list. "I and X went through 'this problem' yesterday, and we solved it this way...." isn't acceptable, but perhaps a "I and X has looked at 'this problem' yesterday, and we think that if we do... Comments?" is more in line with our culture. After all, one person thinking off-line (which is necessary) is no different than two people thinking off-line. One person putting together a patch isn't any different than a pair is writing the same patch. Offline, even cubicle level, CAN be beneficial and it is all about how the interaction with the larger community is handled. I think (and try to live by) the litmus test is "Small reversible steps, with pause to reflect in between" and hence applies both to single individuals and 5 people working in the same room. It also the single most annoying thing for me in commercial development... The rush forward is at such a high pace, that quality feedback can almost never be provided, people place critique on individual lines, not to the over-arching approach, because that is to intrusive and potentially disruptive. Cheers Niclas On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 1:35 AM, Benson Margulies <bimargul...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think it's important to recognize how the board and the foundation > have handled this issue over time. > > The absolute requirement is open decision-making. Avoiding real-time > communications avoids many possible failures of open decision-making. > (Not, of course, all.) After all, the simplest primrose path here is > two people standing at the intersection of their cubicles. The policy > has always been to sternly warn that the use of real time mechanisms > involves risks of failure, and that failure involves risks of the > board's blunt instruments being deployed. Does all of this slow down > some processes, and cause some people of limited patience / boundless > energy to get frustrated? Yup, things have costs. > > Just writing up the results on the mailing list isn't good enough if > there is no real opportunity for people to question, deliberate, and > change the course of action. > > You want to have a bar camp, a con call, a slack discussion, a set of > messages exchanged by carrier pigeon? Then it's up to you to make sure > that you don't end up excluding people from the decision-making > process. > -- Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer http://zest.apache.org - New Energy for Java
