I'm in the odd situation of not particularly wanting to argue in favor of the proposal I wrote, yet finding it hard to resist the provocation of messages that appear, to me, to misunderstand it. So I'll restrict myself to the following, and I won't reply to any further dispute. Anyone else is welcome to have a last-er word than me.
The incubator is like no other Apache project. It is not a meritocratic, volunteer, community, producing a software product for the public good. It is a volunteer, meritocratic, group of people solving a problem for the board. The problem that the incubator sets out to solve is this: "How do you bootstrap a community from scratch?" Because it is a group of people solving a problem for the board, there's no special 'merit' in shaping it in the usual ASF PMC growing community mold. There may by some problems with that shape related to scale, noise, and responsibility. Some people who find those problems to be severe want to make changes. Others, not so much. The board is always free to solve any problem with any structure that it finds effective; there's no 'constitutional' requirement that everything is a meritocratic PMC. Witness what happened to ApacheCon. We have here two competing visions. The current vision says: "Let people who have never run an Apache community it start doing it with coaching and supervision from 'mentors'." The alternative vision says, "Start with a kernel of people who have done it before." Those of you who are happy with the current vision? Great! I wrote up the alternative vision to try to put some clarity onto a lot of prior writing that found fault with the current model and looked for an alternative. In neither model are people powerless in any meaningful sense. In the current model, people have an interaction with the full IPMC. They can get pretty frustrated, but, as Mavin has documented, the frustration is more the fault of the lack of documentation than of the behavior of the IPMC. In the alternative model, they _start out_ with a group of 'strangers' at the center of their community, but those strangers are chosen specifically for their ability and experience in building a consensus community. And, in any case, they they will rapidly become an ever-smaller fraction of the group. Badly-behaved mentors (and other IPMC members) can overbear in the current model, and badly-behaved seed-PMC members could overbear in the alternative. I very much doubt that email discussion will yield any consensus to do anything radical. Which might be fine. When the time comes to find Roman's successor, an interesting situation may arise in which candidates might declare their intention to implement changes. And just to be clear, _I_ am not running on the platform of implementing what I wrote -- or any other way. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
