Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: > > Over time, some seem to recurringly ask that Forrest creates a "simple > committer" role used as a step between being a developer and a PMC member. > > Here is an explanation of what I think I have learned in this respect. > Other people might have different views and recollections.
Thanks for raising such issues. We do need to continually reassess the way that we managemnt our project. Bit more background ... When Forrest was established, it lived under the Apache XML group of projects xml.apache.org. Just like Jakarta for Java, there was one Project Management Committee (PMC) to oversee all the projects: FOP, Batic, Xerces, Forrest, etc. The concept of a separate PMC as an umbrella for a group of projects is now being discouraged, as it has been shown to not work well. The PMC is meant to oversee each project community and its codebase, and make the decisions. This is almost impossible, with maybe one representative from each project and being separate to the committers of the projects. Also the quarterly reports do not give the Board a feel for how the projects are faring. Forrest decided to become a top-level project in May 2004. The first job of our PMC was to establish our project guidelines [1]. One major aspect was how new committers are added and the composition of our PMC. This took a long discussion and much assessment of experiences from other ASF projects. Each project at ASF has free reign to decide their own guidelines. We decided that we did not want it to appear that there is a separation between committers and PMC members. We wanted everyone to be able to have a say regarding the direction of the project, not just a subset of the committers. So we decided that when inviting developers to join, we make them committers and PMC members at the same time. No separate classes of people. Go back to the original concept of the Apache Software Foundation. When we look for new committers, we need to see a few qualities. They should be helping other users and developers, able to work co-operatively, be a mentor, and be repectful of others opinions. Essentially be committed people who understand the Apache way. We decided to conduct discussions and votes about potential new PMC members on the private PMC list, so that we don't talk about personal issues in public. Any existing PMC member can vote no, to say that we need to wait a bit longer to be sure that they can be a part of a team. We also left the way open to have a committer who is not a PMC member. We could see that special situations might arise when we don't want the person to be on the PMC. Examples might include the Google Summer of Code students or someone who needed temporary restricted access to a certain part of our code. They are not following the normal meritocratic procedures. The normal case would be straight from developer to PMC member. During the discussion and vote regarding each potential addition, it would become apparent whether an exception should be made. As Nicola Ken suggests, if anyone feels that we need to change these ways, then please define your case. By the way, anyone who cares can take part in this discussion, not just Forrest PMC members. [1] forrest.apache.org/guidelines.html David
