OK, I'm trying vainly to keep up with community, and while there isn't necessarily a clear consensus, there are a lot of good ideas (and it seems quite polite disagreement).
Sorry I don't have the brainwidth right now for concrete, specific proposals, but here are my take on some larger issues: ASF oversight; the role of community; the technical details. ---- ASF Oversight: Yes, this is a serious issue (as some people seem to gloss over, while some others are super-concerned here) that we do have to deal with. Immaterial of the set of various personal trust levels between all committers, the corporation itself is it's own entity that has to have some set of standards and level of oversight on it's properties (including the apache.org name). Personally, I'd like to see us be fairly open on the general matter of promoting the community of ASF committers; assume that in general committers won't muck things up, and that it's unlikely that really bad things will happen from having ~userid pages posted. As a corollary, it's obvious to me that the ASF does have some general policies on acceptable content (immaterial of if we've written them down all yet) and may well need to exercise control on content posted on our servers. Yes, that's a big hand wave - but if we basically trust committers to post 'acceptable stuff', then we also need to trust that the 'acceptable' level will be reasonably fair (at least from the corporation's point of view). Upshot? Whatever expression of individual content that's not directly related to software projects we host is only allowed under some general ASF guidelines. Break the guidelines, and we remove the content - period. (But I don't expect that to happen much). Heck, I'd be happy with community.apache.org just having a big disclaimer on it's homepage that notes these are individual pages, not directly representative of ASF positions, yadda yadda, yadda. ---- The role of community: A number of people don't seem to want any sort of individual non-project-related stuff hosted at apache.org. But I keep thinking of what we often say is a difference between ASF projects and, say, sourceforge projects: the active and vibrant communities. If having these communities is that important (and I think it is) then we need to try to support it. Those who just don't want to participate, that's OK: but let those who do want to have closer 'feeling' of community go do the work to make it happen (just a general observation; I think we'll work out fine). Yes, mailing lists and email is one way we support that; and yes, some people don't want any more personal contact. Fine - but I think that having more ways to encourage and bring together our communities are a good idea - and webpages are a widely-know, easy to use, and very 'eat your own dogfood' way to support this. Upshot? I'd really like to see some easy-to-use framework to get at least some basic individual content - preferably with ASF project tie-ins - hosted on some sort of apache.org site. If we have a likely solution I plan to put up a bit about my projects as well. Oh, and opt-in only, obviously; basic guidelines about keep it ASF-related, etc. ---- The Technical Details and Who Does the Work Well, yes, it all comes down to the details. But for me, I'd be happy with several of the suggestions - whatever we can get some consensus on, and can get some volunteers to organize and *document* it. Since I don't have the httpd admin experience or enough extra time to materially help on setting this up, I'll just send my thanks to those who actually set it up. (Sometimes I surprise myself with how easygoing I can be... just sometimes). Along with work in incubator, I'm glad to see we're documenting some of our guidelines and making them much more obvious to find! Upshot? Well, in general I'm happy with either of these proposals or something similar: +1 to community.apache.org which gets auto-linked to everyone's ~user/public_html pages somehow. +1 to some form of project-specific lists of 'who we are' that gives committers opportunity for just a picture, paragraph, and URL ---- Note: we need to agree on something For everyone worried about liability (legal or /.) in general - we have to either have a documented way to do something for community, or we need to turn off the default httpd sharing of ~user directories. Now that we've recognized this, let's address it. Thanks to those who've put forth such good ideas, especially those trying to crystallize ideas and focus on specific proposals. I really like RoUS's 5 points in his "it looks like several issues are getting conflated again." email. I also liked this particular quote from Sam Ruby: > The ASF I wish to be a part of is one and/or create is one that > tolerates differences in points of view or approach to solving problems. ===== - Shane <eof .sig="'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a very scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less'" "Oohayu oyod?!"=gis. /> __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
