At 05:43 13/1/01 -0800, Hans Bergsten wrote:
>If you have any interest in the future of the Jakarta project, I think you
>should come.
I know it's out of context but this neatly summarizes it doesn't it ;) What
you may ask - well let me elaborate. When I first started working with
Apache peeps it was great - I never heard any complaints or had any issues.
It was Stefano who introduced of sorts to it all so if I wanted something I
would bug him and it would happen ;)
Then I started hearing grumblings from a few people. Usually they involved
one of these points
1. It is too slow to get projects hosted at Apache unless you are good
friends with PMC members
2. Some people were trying to bully/intimadate others because they were on
the PMC/were in the clique
3. Outside projects had to work to get hosted rather than Apache working to
aquire them
I pretty much ignored them as they didn't effect me and to a large extent I
don't care for the politicing. A bit later I heard even worse criticism
about the process mainly from a few bitter individuals/groups thou I think
most of what they said was unwarranted so it is of no use repeating it
here. One thing I noticed was that some of the politicers seemed to be
under stress and a little overworked - and consequently a little short ;)
Recently I have been forced to stick my head up and look around at this
structure. I am not a member of apache so immediately a number of doors
were closed. I tried asking people things and basically they said - "I
dunno" to 90% of the questions. I initially presumed it was because most
people weren't members. So I asked a member and they were in the dark
aswell ... hmmm. Aparently management still takes place behind closed doors
away from the groups own members ! Eek. Not pretty - another member also
noted this and expressed the fact they were for intents powerless to effect
this.
Of course I see these things as problems. So what I would like is for them
to be addressed in some form ;)
I have been thinking how I would do it and I came to the conclusion that
the only way to run it is by "opening" management up. This is an opensource
group so why not "opensource" the leadership? Currently jakarta is led from
behind closed doors by privlidged members. You can not gain access - at
least easily - to the resources within Apache.
I know there is mailing lists that the public is restricted from accessing
and only the clique may get in - however why is this necessary ? I
understand that there may be - on rare occasions - a need to discuss
details under a NDA and thus outside the public eye. However - what about
the remainder of the time. Is there any need to exclude the rest of the
community?
This is not the only exclusionary practices I have noticed either. This
meeting proposed is another example of practices that (possibly
inadvertently) are exclusionary. The vast majority of the jakarta/java
apache community would find it impossible to actually participate due to
practical reasons. Personally it would cost me about $4000 to go factoring
in travel, accomodation and time-off - and a phone call while cheaper would
still run me up just under $1000 (depends on mapping to local timezone).
Consequently the decisions for the community will be made by a presumably
close-nit, geographically close group of friends that more than likely
share similar opinions. So how is it possible that they could possibly
represent the views of the community?
For instance - it is somewhat disturbing that the fate of ant is going to
be decided at this meeting when the majority of active committers are not
present. Even more disturbing is that it is the person who has been focus
of conflict on ant and set out in many ways to destroy the community and
rebuild it in his own image that will be preciding over the discussion and
consequently will have a large say in the matter.
Now I am not saying it is the fault of anyone - I believe the PM have the
best intentions at heart and do put in a lot to make it work. However there
is the saying "The path to hell is paved with good intentions" ;)
I believe opening the organisation would help this. Hopefully people would
be able to become more aware of the resources at Apache (like our JCP rep),
more willing to help out with boring administrative stuff (most people
aren't aware you can "patch" the website) and generally relieve the
workload on PMC. It would also be one step closer to building a better
community. There could be a few objections but I believe if you are not
comfortable saying something in public then you probably shouldn't be
saying it in the first place ;)
Another change that could occur is the restriction of "official"
face-to-face meetings to times like ApacheCon. It would be at this time
that AGMs/votes/whatever could take place so you get high bandwidth and
high fidelity.
This still leaves the problem of realtime/high-bandwidth collaboration. No
matter what you do there are going to be people who are excluded for one
reason or another but it is best to minimize that. The only solution that I
can think of for decent collaboration is probably IRC or something similar.
It is still difficuly for the timezone challenged (ie I used to get up at
4:30 am *shudder* Monday morning to participate in certain groups) but
usually these effects can be minimized. I am sure there are some irc
servers that would be willing to host apache discussions. As a bonus people
could even save transcripts so others could see what went down.
I am sure there are other collaborative tools out there that we could use
aswell...
Anyways thats just a few thoughts.
Cheers,
Pete
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