On Fri, Mar 03, 2017 at 11:19:39AM +0100, Guido Serra wrote: > On 2017-03-03 10:47 (+0100), Andrew Musselman <a...@apache.org> wrote: > > Hi Guido, thanks for your note.> > > > > Can you tell us more about why things aren't working so far?> > > Hi Andrew, > well, we do not have data yet as the global team has been established just > few months ago. > The few things I’ve noticed so far is that I found difficult to engage people > in FLOSS projects. > …to the point that I had to take an external contractor to contribute to one > of them.
Hi Guido, Is there much overlap between your internal projects and FLOSS projects? Sounds like your engineers approach FLOSS projects like a product (a black box software module) instead of looking at it as a community which shares a common goal of producing a piece of software. Apache views its projects as communities first and as software projects second. > More in general I’m curious to hear about coordination between different > timezones, as from > time to time we still have to jump on a plane and get face 2 face with the > people… as the > channels like emails/slack/confluence/ghangout are not sufficient to build > trust and belonging > & engagement feelings to the organisation and the project. Face-to-face meetings are very important for community building. Most open source projects have conferences where developers meet on the side, or even dedicated events (hackathons) for developers. You should definitely encourage these kinds of events with distributed teams. Remote communication becomes a lot easier after such events. Another rule often applied at Apache is "if a discussion did not happen on the mailing list, it did not happen". This avoids information silos and balances out potential political power games between groups. See http://producingoss.com/en/setting-tone.html (This book is about running open source projects, but the communication problems are similar in your case. Generally a recommended read!) > I just went to a meet-up here in Berlin, where someone just gave a very > holistic speech on > how pink and beautiful is his organisation where everybody is proactive, > feels responsible, > code is forked and distributed in multiple branch of the organisation and all > merges back > seamlessly… I have some hard time believing that… so, I’m more interested to > hear experiences > from others where things didn’t work and what other approaches have been > attempted. I am in Berlin, too. We could meet sometime if you would like to. My main experience is working in open source projects. I have visited closed corporate settings to do consulting but I have never participated in actual software development in such environments. So I don't think I can provide much insight into other company's problems. But I can help explain why open source communities I am involved with work the way they do, to provide an additional perspective. Cheers, Stefan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
