On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Sam Ruby wrote:
> I'm planning on submitting a proposal to change the bylaws of Jakarta to Now this seems an excelent idea to address the immediate and short term issues around oversight and management. However I am not sure if this is a good idea in the long run. I fundamentally believe that the HTTP PMC model is flawed in its current form; and simply generates another 'layer' and a weird birthday cake. Right now we have committers, and some of those are members. That is one stack. We've got those in fair numbers. At the same time, and quite orthogonal, we have a few weird people who volunteer to be on PMC's and Boards. There is some sort of stack there; but largely these crowds are small; and actually do not do that much. Code development, Code management and Release management; the number one tasks of the ASF are essentially out of bounds in this second stack. That by and large lives on the dev@ mailing lists; and encompasses a much wider group than just the committers. With that out of reach this makes the PMC and board quite boring; and more about things like licenses, legal stuff, relations with evil empires, etc, etc. By simply 'shoveling' the most active or a large self selected group of committers into a PMC; the PMC starts too look too much like a place where real things 'happen'. Things such as code development and long term code future planning. I personally do not want that; I want to see that almost exclusively done on [EMAIL PROTECTED] And have any 'old boys lists' = i.e. those not open to -anyone- interested our software - to be as boring, dormant and non code relavant as possible. A second objection I have against large PMCs is that those really focus the oversight task onto just one person; the chair. As I personally think that a group larger than 10 people will have a hard time to devide oversight labour amongst themselves. Or in other words the 'peer' pressure is small when something 'needs' to be done; as you can always think; I am one of 50 folks :-). So, (but please do ignore me - I aint no Jakarta community member :-), I think that this PMC solution of Sam is a good one in the short term as it fixes our immediate issues; but long term I would dearly see PMC's of that kind simply become a synonym for 'committers on a project' and see those group 'delegating up' a few boring but key aspects related to licensing and policy to a smaller group who is easier to address. Dw
