Roy T. Fielding wrote: > Noel J. Bergman wrote: > > Membership is a half-way point? What's the full distance? ;-) > I'll let you know when I get there.
According to some, disagreeing with Roy is the obligatory Right of Passage. ;-) > > But I agree with you: "It is absolute nonsense to have someone guiding > > newbies through the ASF process when they haven't even made it to the > > halfway point themselves." And so we should not elect them to the > > Incubator PMC. > You don't have to be a mentor to be involved. Of course not. That was never in question. > > We just voted to elect a non-Member ASF Officer to the Incubator > > PMC in order for him to act as Mentor for the projects sponsored > > by the PMC of which he is the PMC Chair. Do we wish to declare > > that election and process null and void? Or do you concur that > > the Incubator PMC has the right to elect whom it feels appropriate > > to execute the role, based upon its collective human judgement? > The Incubator PMC decided that only an ASF member can qualify as being > a Mentor, period. And has, on more than one occasion, voted in violation of that decision. So at least some months ago, we started talking (more than once on this list) about Mentors being just the active Incubator PMC members involved in the project. But that is neither here nor there at this point. What matters is the consensus going forward. > That has nothing whatsoever to do with who is able to be on the PMC. > [anyone involved in the process should be on the incubator PMC.] So we would have people who have a binding vote on all decisions made within the Incubator, including all projects under Incubation, and yet not qualified to be Mentors? How would you care to differentiate the two? Incubator PMC members are, by definition in the Bylaws (http://www.apache.org/foundation/bylaws.html#6.3), the people responsible for active management of the Incubator project(s). The role of Mentor is strictly a construction of the Incubator PMC, which I believe ought to be able to select Mentors as the PMC sees fit. Especially since any criteria are of its own making. > > Is the Board wrong to permit Officers who are not Members? Just > > how far do you want to take this? Are you really going to hold > > the Incubator PMC's (and the Board's) decisions hostage to the > > voting schedule of the Foundation? > Yes. The only way that we have for the ASF as a whole to validate that > someone has sufficient clue and commitment to guide future projects > is to elect them as an ASF member. No one else has the right to say > they are qualified. No one else but whom? And why exactly does the Incubator PMC not have that right, when the Mentor role (and the necessary criteria) is one of its own creation? And although I've made the comment that I put considerable weight on whether or not I feel that a nominee for Membership would make a good Mentor, the Membership as a whole has never identified having "sufficient clue and commitment to guide future projects" as a key criteria for Member election. So whether or not the Membership *should* be that judge, it certainly has not been to date, in that it has not made that a key criteria. If we are to take your statement in that light, it would be an important point to make clear to all Members that they should only nominate and vote for those whom they feel have "sufficient clue and commitment to guide future projects." Well, that ought to slow down growth of the Membership. And there are those who would not be Members had that been a primary (or mandatory) basis. Regardless, this does reinforce my belief that the Incubator may well be the best place for someone interested in becoming a Member to invest time, since it is one of the few places were their participation would be visible to a wide range of existing Members. > There are some people who should have been made an ASF member > long before they became officers, but that is in the past. And yet they hadn't. Why not? And why would you therefore want to say that the Incubator PMC should preclude itself from selecting such people, whom you feel should have long since been Members, as Mentors? > Right now, the people who are officers and not yet ASF members simply > do not know what they need to know to do their job well, and we struggle > from that quite frequently. So, yes, the Board is wrong to make non-Members ASF Officers? And from where would you expect the missing education to come? > That doesn't mean people need to be an ASF member to be involved in > incubation of a project -- they simply don't meet the required need > for a Mentor who is an ASF member. A "need" imposed by no other agency than the Incubator PMC, itself. --- Noel --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
