I do not dispute anything written below nor do I intend this to be a last word, just a clarification.
> I n neither model are people powerless in any meaningful sense. I approached these proposals by putting myself in the shoes of a newcomer as best as I'm able (I've been PMC for years and PPMC also). The feeling of investment in the process I'd have would be different than before under the second two options (*not* the mentor reboot), as would be the calculus of bringing a project to Apache. I have not observed the IPMC model to take ownership away, because the initial contributors bringing their project here are formed into a PPMC of equals and the usual release votes done by the IPMC are up-or-down checks on releases, not exercises in differential power. On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Benson Margulies <bimargul...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. > > I > > n 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 > > -- Best regards, - Andy Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back. - Piet Hein (via Tom White)
