On May 19, 2012, at 2:27 AM, Martin Schönberger wrote: > Thank you both, again, for your answers! > >> Hope it helps > > Yes it definitely did, and could cast aside most of my uncertainties. > I have just a few quick remarks and follow-ups: > >>> In a related matter, many of the role descriptions of the core developers >>> contain manager and leadership titles. > >> Hmm. Do you have a link? AFAIK we just have committers. > > I'm sorry, I guess my mistake here was not taking the separation > between XWiki SAS and XWiki.org into consideration. I was referring to > http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Company/Team, where three Project > Managers, a Team Leader, a Communication Manager, an Administration > Manager, a Support & Documentation Manager, a Research Manager, etc. > are mentioned, so I thought these roles might be relevant. The same > group of people working on the same projects in two different ways, > this is still a bit hard for me to grasp.
It's easy: think about it in the same way in which a person always belongs to several groups: * group of your close friends * group of people sharing a hobby with you * group of people playing a sport with you * group of people going to Church with you etc For all these groups you're the same person but with different hats when you're in one of those groups. And each of these groups has its own rules. The only hard part here is that there's the word "XWiki" in both entities (open source project and company). I personally don't like this since it brings ambiguity when we have a very clear separation between both. >>> What, in practice, are the main tasks of the people managing the >>> development? > >> There's nobody managing the development ;) >> We're auto-managed. > > I see your point. So everyone (who is interested and dedicated) takes > an equal part in making decisions? Yes. That's our vote process. > Do you think these collegial > agreements would still hold if the base of contributors was > significantly larger or wider spread, and therefore incorporated more > diverse ideas about the project? Or would the system have to be > adapted to scale successfully? Right now we're about 15 active committers. I have no idea at what level it would break but my gut feeling is that it would hold till about 50 active committers. The reason for this value is that I've worked in the past in company where we all had the same title and worked collegially and we only had to introduce a hierarchy when we reached 50 employees or so. Actually I even think that the open source project could go beyond this value since it's much more free and relaxed than a company. Note that I'm talking about committers. Now there are a lot more people participating in various ways (raising issues, suggesting ideas, supporting others on the list, writing articles/blog posts/tweeting, sending pull requests, etc). Also note that there aren't that many projects with 50 active committers (Actually I can't even cite one!) so we're pretty safe for a long time IMO ;) Thanks -Vincent _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
