> I just have strong feelings about > community self-governance and understanding and I will be honest about the > fact that I am worried about creeping legalism at the ASF. Instead of > looking for symptoms, I think Sharpeners should be looking for, and aiming > to help with, basic challenges. In the use cases, I dumped vague > descriptions of some challenges. They may be wrong and it might be better > to just provide some kind of engagement path for Sharpeners and let them > dig in. What I don't want to see is "red flags" leading to Sharpeners > showing up and distracting communities from solving real problems or making > them think they have problems when they don't.
Sure, that’s a fair criticism. And I think the way forward is to consider these items and think about what the underlying problem is - or, more helpfully, what *recommendation* we would want to make to such a project, and transform this list into, instead, a list of solutions (or additional entries in the use cases file) rather than problems? > > I will provide a concrete example here that I hope won't offend anyone <snip> It’s a good example, for sure, of someone well-meaning trying to fix a problem. It feels useful to consider how we would have wanted this handled instead, with that insight and insider knowledge. Just leave well enough alone? Find a way to better communicate what’s happening? Encourage other projects to similar patterns? (I honestly don’t know, because I wasn’t involved in that situation.) > > The point of the example is that the real problems (and others that I may > be personally blind to) can only be seen by observing and engaging with the > community. When I was a new board member, I used to try to do this for the > projects that I was shepherding. It soon became more work than I had time > to do consistently, but I always tried. I see the Sharpeners as a > potential source of people to do this. It might actually be best not to > have "triggers" for engagement at all other than requests from the > communities themselves. Maybe just assign people on some kind of rotation > like the Board shepherds. That would have the positive side effect of > Sharpeners getting to learn from healthy communities too. I guess I was thinking (but hadn’t written anywhere yet) that the trigger would be reading board reports, and thinking, hmm, that project looks like it might need some help. I would *love* to see requests from the communities. And, indeed, we have gotten those, over the years, here on the dev@community list, and didn’t have any process for saying yes. So perhaps the mechanism is to advertise this service to projects, and wait for takers. Then advertise successes. Repeat. What I’ve found as board shepherd is that you never get a deep enough knowledge of any given project to really be particularly helpful. Each month when I’m shepherding, I’m spending 20 minutes, maybe, on each shepherd project. That’s *definitely* not enough time for the kind of deep dive I think we’re both talking about. My hope is that a sharpener, unlike a shepherd, would spend enough time listening that they would actually start to understand what they’re hearing, and become a legitimate member of the project community.
