On 12/6/16, 3:36 AM, "Rich Bowen" <rbo...@rcbowen.com> wrote:
>On Dec 6, 2016 6:10 AM, "Bertrand Delacretaz" <bdelacre...@apache.org> >wrote: > >I hope we agree on that and I think we do, I'm just slightly worried >that your initiative might be interpreted in the wrong way. > >I am confident that my initiative will be interpreted the wrong way. Seems >to be the way of things. Don't know if this will help, but this thread caused me to look up some definitions of words like "goals", "strategies" and "plans". There seems to be different interpretations, but I sort of liked the following: -goal: Statement of what you want to achieve -strategy: The current plan under execution. -plan: A set of steps to execute. In other words, if you have a goal to increase number of committers, you might have a plan A and a plan B, and the strategy might be to execute on plan A and fall back to plan B. So under these definitions, I think ComDev should certainly have goals. Rich wrote (snipped heavily for brevity): 1) Increase community diversity. 2) Develop tools (documentation, training materials, and software tools) that projects can use to promote themselves and attract new participants. 3) Educate projects on the Apache Way, so that they can more richly experience the organization that they have attached themselves to. 4) Strengthen the bonds between projects and the larger Foundation. 5) It's not about marketing, but we should be working very closely with marketing (press@) to promote what our projects are doing, and promote the idea of the ASF as a place where innovation happens. 6) Internal promotion and cheerleading. Many of our projects have no idea what other projects are doing, and don't care. Doing a degree of internal cheerleading, along with the education, is critical for building exprit de corps. IMO, 1, 3, maybe 4 are goals. 2, 5, 6 are parts of a plan. The goals could use some success metrics (closer matching to the world-wide demographics of developers, fewer wayward projects for the board to handle). But I sort of agree with Bertrand that there may not need to be a well-defined strategy and plans for ComDev. It is fine for ComDev to have managers whose job is to facilitate and arbitrate on activities. Those people answer the "how can I help" with "here are the goals, here are things some people are doing, help them out or come up with your own idea". But I thought Bertrand's point was to make sure folks are encourage to come up with their own ideas. The only measurement is whether it can be argued as helping achieve the goals, not necessarily whether it matches up with any steps in plans being executed by others. I live in a smallish community that is growing because it is a nice place to live. Folks move here, bring their volunteer ideas about how to make living here a bit better, and generally, are told to go for it. There is one volunteer group with a few folks who network between all of the other volunteers and volunteer organizations in this community to try to coordinate efforts and deal with conflict. ComDev only has to be that one group. My 2 cents, -Alex
