Hey, friends,
I’m recovering from FOSDEM, and going through my notes. I would like to propose
a somewhat unformed idea that I would like to pursue for the next year or so -
the idea of forming working groups here in ComDev, to pursue different tasks.
The reasoning for this is that, while I have eleventy million things that I
want to accomplish under the umbrella of of ComDev, I have a tendency to just
go do stuff myself, because building consensus is *hard*. That leads,
consistently, to three outcomes:
• The stuff doesn’t actually get done, because my list is long
• Nobody else does it either, because that’s Rich’s project
• I get super frustrated that nobody is helping, even though I created that
situation myself, and know that I created it.
This is hugely unproductive, and I would like to see if we can take a step
towards making it easier for people to participate in narrowly defined ways
that don’t seem quite as daunting as our current way of operating.
A working group would have a topic (“Website” is the first one that I’m likely
to propose), a defined scope of work, and regular check-ins where progress is
assessed, and narrowly defined action items can be volunteered for.
I love the way Kubernetes tackles this (see
https://github.com/kubernetes/community for some of that) but we tend to
believe, here at Apache, that this is too heavy on the structure side. I have
come to think, over the past few months, that we need more structure, because
our “just go jump in and do stuff!!” approach is hugely intimidating to
beginners, and is no better than “figure it out yourself, I’m too busy” in
terms of trying to engage new contributors.
Now, I know that this email is very fluffy and philosophical. I’ll be proposing
a specific WG later this week, as soon as soon as I can write it up, and asking
for folks to participate.
More, and more rambling, thoughts on this topic, here:
https://drbacchus.com/the-many-hats-of-a-maintainer/ - if you’re interested.
—
Rich Bowen
rbo...@rcbowen.com
