Igniters, The Chair rotation discussion [1] triggered many questions such as why would we rotate the Chair, what happens with the diversity, and overall community growth. Let's use this thread to discuss the status of the project and to highlight some areas of improvement in 2020. This will help all of us, including project PMC and a new Chair, to stay focused on what matters the most for the community growth and broader adoption of Ignite. Let me be the first as a current PMC Chair and share the most important observations.
*Dev Community Diversity* 2019 (now): Personally, the status quo is changed; many of the community members who have the luxury to contribute daily no longer work for a single vendor. Vendors are not trying to take control of the community but, instead, follow the guidelines and spirit of the open-source/ASF based development. It's great to see that a lot of knowledge has been shared between us after this change and this process is ongoing and never-ending. We're proving that even though Ignite is a complex technology, many can contribute to it if find support and mentored by more skillful community members. Next, while those of us who contribute on their best effort (like Saikat or Roman Shtykh) are still with the community and help to drive changes, many who were previously active disappear after changing employees. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming anybody personally, there might be many reasons for that. But would like to stress out that we as a healthy community needs both who can contribute daily and on a best effort. If your life is changing, don't abandon the community if Ignite matters something to you, just slow down but stay or send a good-buy message explaining why you can no longer be involved. Ignite shouldn't be a pay-check driven community. 2020 (future) - overall, these are the areas I'd like to propose to focus on: * Provide greater support and mentorship to newcomers - we need more experts who can contribute daily or on a best effort. Share the knowledge, pay good for good, remember that one day in the past you were a newcomer and you had found support. * Pay attention to the quality and readability of the code - we need to spend more time on code refactoring and advanced test coverage. Otherwise, it's much harder to raise new committers and more time will be spent on fixes than on improvements. * Promote the community, encourage skillful developers to join us. *User Community - Support and Experience* 2019 (now): Ignite user community is in the top 5 most active communities of the ASF (among 350+ top-level projects). Isn't this great? We need to be proud of this. It means the project resonates with the needs of many. What's worrisome is that in *most of the time* the user community finds support from Ignite experts who work for GridGain. The vendor basically sponsors this by asking its employees to keep an eye on the user list to ensure the user community gets its questions answered. This needs to be improved because the dev community has to stay connected with the user community for support and feedback. The project is being developed for our users, remember that, no users no need in Ignite. 2020 (future): - Greater support and connection between dev and user communities - committers need to be active on the user lists. - Help new users to learn about Ignite and start using it - blog, present at meetups, conferences and webinars, share with your fellow developers. Ignite is your and our project, come out of the building and tell of your work proudly. Sorry for a long story, share your thoughts. [1] http://apache-ignite-developers.2346864.n4.nabble.com/DISCUSS-PMC-Chair-rotation-time-td11941.html - Denis
