(chair-hat=on ... no big deal, it means that the views are not necessarily my personal opinion. They are concerns that i am raising as the chair.)
When we started our Forrest Friday monthly IRC get togethers, we tried to address the long-standing ASF concerns about mailing lists being the primary communication. We agreed to go ahead as an experiment, be careful with its use, be sure to summarise proceedings, commit the logs, enable the whole community to be involved, make decisions on the mailing list. One of our board reports [1] referred to the commencement of these sessions. The board followed up to ensure that there is wide community participation. We had a discussion on the Forrest private pmc@ mailing list to address some specific concerns. Those have subsequently been raised on the dev@ list. [1] The minutes are now public, so i can point the dev@ list to them: http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2005/board_minutes_2005_11_16.txt Two of the concerns were: --------- A) Hard to match IRC handles with developers identities. To ensure that participation and oversight is sufficient we would need to at least be able to determine PMC members. We have tried to deal with this by using better IDs. Also some of the committers have applied for "IRC cloaks". We need to follow up again to get that list registered. --------- B) We started out well with the Summaries, but were becoming slack. We did try to make an effort. This should not be left to one person. The situation now feels worse to me. --------- It is now time to assess whether we want to continue. I have been wanting to raise this issue for a while The discussion at Incubator [2] spurred me. Is it successful for us at Apache Forrest? Does it enable the whole community to be involved? Can we address the concern about the summaries? Should we let it continue? People other than the Forrest PMC can also help with this decision. What is your experience? (chair-hat=off ... i will try to do followup as an individual.) [2] Yesterday the use of IRC came up at Apache Incubator. Projects who are experimenting with IRC are asked to report their experiences. I tried to relate some of ours. I find mail archives hard to refer to. The current thread starts around here: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/200606.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] or the same via gmane: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.general/9368/focus=9369 Re: Extensible Ajax Platform (XAP) Project Update Re: primary email, balanced use of IRC -David
