On Dec 12, 2012, at 1:57 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:

>> But a close-to-zero month
>> for those parameters says a lot about how inactive the community is, if
>> you're interested in that.
> 
> Well that's just it, we (the ASF) are not interested in that kind of
> statistic. 

If I might clarify something that Ross is saying here ... (and taking the 
remark completely out of context to make the point)

Alvaro's and Jesus's contribution to this project is all about statistics - 
statistics that are very valuable in measuring the activity and health of a 
project. We, the Allura project, are VERY interested in this kind of statistic. 
And as a community manager (and thus end-user of this particular feature), I'm 
very interested in having these kinds of statistics available about the 
projects I work with - not so that I can say that *this* project is a 8 and 
therefore worth my time, and *that* one is a 3 and not worth my time, but 
rather as a high-level dashboard to watch the project's health over time.

When Ross says that we (the ASF) are not interested in that kind of statistic, 
he is *not* saying that your contributions aren't welcome or wanted on the 
Allura project, but rather that the ASF governance (the board) is interested in 
other kinds of things in reports to the board. The board is interested in the 
things specifically listed here: http://apache.org/foundation/board/reporting.  
One of those items is the "overall activity in the project over the past 
quarter", which can be interpreted a number of ways, but probably should be as 
brief as possible to receive the message. If a project has no releases for a 
quarter, or no commits for a quarter, the board isn't terribly concerned - 
there's many reasons that might happen. If a project has no commits for two 
years, we're going to be concerned.

I don't know if you took Ross's statement that way, but it occurred to me while 
I was reading it, that in the context of a board report, he's completely 
correct, but if you read that in the context of your contributions to the 
project, it might result in the wrong conclusions. After all, we added you to 
the PMC as a result of those contributions.

-- 
Rich Bowen
[email protected]
Shosholoza


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