OK -- This is really late/lame, but I'm just now noticing (while preparing the xmlbeans quarterly report to the board) that a vote for Lawrence Jones as an xmlbeans committer went to the private pmc list back at the end of January, but never to this dev list. In fact, there was never even a message sent to any public list with the results of the vote, which is really not the way we should be doing things. As the chair of the pmc, I should have been paying more attention to which mailing list these emails were sent to, but I want to make sure that this issue is fixed (even if nearly two months late) and that everyone understands how this should work.
So, first the belated news about Lawrence Jones: Lawrence was nominated at the end of January to be an xmlbeans committer. All six of the votes cast were +1s. Congratulations to Lawrence! He was voted in as a committer based on months of consistent contributions, including a lot of work on the 2.1 release, and a constant presence responding to users on the mailing lists. ---- Now for the way that votes for committers and pmc members should work: There is very little that should ever need to be done on a private list, such as the pmc list. The business of the pmc should generally be conducted on the public dev list. All technical decisions *must* be made on public lists. Sensitive legal issues or security issues are the kinds of things that we might need to keep private. However, in order to avoid publicly humiliating someone by having their committer vote vetoed by someone who could have indicated his/her concern privately, the xmlbeans project (and several other asf projects) have traditionally sent a private notice to the pmc list indicating an intention to nominate and call a vote. Since all binding votes are cast by pmc members, this allows any known negative issues that could warrant a veto to be addressed privately. If there are no unresolved, critical concerns, the nomination and vote should be proposed on the dev list. This public vote accomplishes at least three things: 1. it allows the xmlbeans developer community to be aware of changes in the people responsible for the code; 2. it informs/reminds the xmlbeans developer community how such processes work; and, 3. it gives anyone on the dev list a chance to voice positive or negative comments about the person or the process. Before any of this public phase happens, we know that no one with a binding vote (pmc members) expects to vote negatively; however, those with a binding vote could still be influenced by the non-binding feedback from the broader community during the voting period. After the typical 72-hour voting period, the results are announced on the dev list and the infrastructure requirements are taken care of. ---- So, with Lawrence's nomination, the private notice of intention to nominate was sent to the pmc; the problem was that, after there were no objections, the rest of the process did not happen publicly. Again, as the chair, I should have caught this at the time; but, I want to make sure it is addressed now. Thanks for reading this far. Cliff --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
