On 8/20/21 1:11 PM, Roger Whitcomb wrote:
Hi all,
My name is Roger Whitcomb and I’m the current PMC Chair for the Apache Pivot
project. The Pivot community has been dwindling for a number of years, to
where I am essentially the only one working / contributing to it for probably 5
years now. Recently (well 6 months ago), the necessary 3rd (active) PMC member
resigned, and so we are left with just two of us who have demonstrated any
readiness to respond to votes, etc. So, I have been, in my quarterly Board
reports, raising awareness that we’re in trouble because of the lack of
sufficient oversight. The responses to my last report were to the effect that
I should either contact ComDev to see if there were ideas / suggestions about
rebooting or raising interest in the project, OR talk to the Attic folks about
moving there. Since I’m still actively working on the project, trying to
reboot things still seems good, even though privately I have serious doubts
that this could happen.
So, why am I contacting you? Well, precisely to get thoughts / ideas /
suggestions, if there are any, on how to at least raise interest to the point
of recruiting another PMC member for oversight of the project. Secondly, has
anyone here been in this position before? If so, what happened? Any thoughts
about alternatives? I have thought about retiring the project to the Attic,
but then forking to Github (or similar) to continue the work I’m doing.
However, that seems like a LOT of work (probably including changing names,
changing all the packages, etc, etc.) and I’m not sure of the legal
ramifications, since copyright (I assume) would remain with the ASF still.
Anyway, I will have a separate conversation with Legal about this, I suppose.
Bottom line: anyone able to give some advice?
(Apologies if you have already tried all of these things, but ...)
The first thing I would recommend is to tell the users list about the
concerns, and describe specific opportunities to contribute. In many
(even most?) projects, the vast majority of users are content to
consume, and never even think about contributing. If you communicate
that the project is likely to be terminated if nobody steps up, you may
see a handful of people who are willing to do so - particularly if they
are at companies that rely on the project.
Identifying specific tasks that need to be done (including a PMC role)
is always more effective than a general call for help.
This may also be the time to consider whether your requirements (written
or not) for committer rights have been too high. Perhaps there are
people out there who have contributed, over the years, but were not
deemed worthy of committer rights. Over time, this leads to missing out
on potential community members. Look back over the past few years and
see who has sent in patches, or other non-code contributions, and
approach them about their willingness to participate at a higher level.
Do you know of any companies/orgs that are relying on the project? I
would encourage you to reach out to someone at those companies and tell
them that the project is facing retirement, if nobody steps up to
contribute and lead. That can also be very effective in finding some
managers willing to give some of their employee time to sustain the
project rather than having to retool.
--
Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com
@rbowen
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