On Jul 14, 2006, at 11:20 PM, Noel J. Bergman wrote:
We just voted to elect a non-Member ASF Officer to the Incubator
PMC in order for him to act as Mentor for the projects sponsored
by the PMC of which he is the PMC Chair. Do we wish to declare
that election and process null and void? Or do you concur that
the Incubator PMC has the right to elect whom it feels appropriate
to execute the role, based upon its collective human judgement?
The Incubator PMC decided that only an ASF member can qualify as
being
a Mentor, period.
And has, on more than one occasion, voted in violation of that
decision.
No, it hasn't. Some people may have voted for a project proposal
without
realizing that the Mentor is not an ASF member, and that may have
allowed
an invalid proposal to pass. It should not happen.
So at least some months ago, we started talking (more than once on
this list)
about Mentors being just the active Incubator PMC members involved
in the
project. But that is neither here nor there at this point. What
matters is
the consensus going forward.
We have talked about a lot of things -- the policy has not changed.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with who is able to be on the PMC.
[anyone involved in the process should be on the incubator PMC.]
So we would have people who have a binding vote on all decisions
made within
the Incubator, including all projects under Incubation, and yet not
qualified to be Mentors? How would you care to differentiate the two?
Every incubator project must have at least one Mentor who is an ASF
member.
The reason is because only an ASF member has access to everything in the
ASF, which is sometimes necessary for a podling to know what it should
be doing in any given situation.
Incubator PMC members are, by definition in the Bylaws
(http://www.apache.org/foundation/bylaws.html#6.3), the people
responsible
for active management of the Incubator project(s). The role of
Mentor is
strictly a construction of the Incubator PMC, which I believe ought
to be
able to select Mentors as the PMC sees fit. Especially since any
criteria
are of its own making.
Yes, and we made it: a Mentor must be an ASF member. There are many
more
PMC members than Mentors. The fact that we trust these people
implicitly
doesn't make up for the fact that they do not have access to the private
information needed to mentor a podling. That private information
includes,
among other things, the sum of all mistakes made by previous Apache
projects.
Is the Board wrong to permit Officers who are not Members? Just
how far do you want to take this? Are you really going to hold
the Incubator PMC's (and the Board's) decisions hostage to the
voting schedule of the Foundation?
Yes. The only way that we have for the ASF as a whole to validate
that
someone has sufficient clue and commitment to guide future projects
is to elect them as an ASF member. No one else has the right to say
they are qualified.
No one else but whom? And why exactly does the Incubator PMC not
have that
right, when the Mentor role (and the necessary criteria) is one of
its own
creation?
The Incubator PMC has made its decision. I have no idea what you are
talking about when you say that the documentation needs to be changed
when the policy HAS NOT CHANGED.
And although I've made the comment that I put considerable weight
on whether
or not I feel that a nominee for Membership would make a good
Mentor, the
Membership as a whole has never identified having "sufficient clue and
commitment to guide future projects" as a key criteria for Member
election.
So whether or not the Membership *should* be that judge, it
certainly has
not been to date, in that it has not made that a key criteria. If
we are to
take your statement in that light, it would be an important point
to make
clear to all Members that they should only nominate and vote for
those whom
they feel have "sufficient clue and commitment to guide future
projects."
No, but once they become Members they do have access to a clue, whereas
it is guaranteed that non-members do not.
Well, that ought to slow down growth of the Membership. And there
are those
who would not be Members had that been a primary (or mandatory) basis.
Regardless, this does reinforce my belief that the Incubator may
well be the
best place for someone interested in becoming a Member to invest
time, since
it is one of the few places were their participation would be
visible to a
wide range of existing Members.
Alternatively, we can encourage the lazy bastards in underrepresented
projects to nominate people on time, as I did for the last election.
There are some people who should have been made an ASF member
long before they became officers, but that is in the past.
And yet they hadn't. Why not? And why would you therefore want to
say that
the Incubator PMC should preclude itself from selecting such
people, whom
you feel should have long since been Members, as Mentors?
Because those people, while not Members, did not have access to what
they must know as Mentors. It doesn't matter how great they are --
mentoring is passing EXPERIENCE on to the next generation and one
simply cannot do that without the necessary experience. Non-members
do not guide people towards taking ownership of the ASF as a whole.
That's why many of the Jakarta subprojects had such a bizarre view
of the ASF: there was no reason for them to view ASF membership as a
consequence of project development at Jakarta and there were not
enough members per capita to cause the new volunteers to be nominated
when they had earned it.
Right now, the people who are officers and not yet ASF members simply
do not know what they need to know to do their job well, and we
struggle
from that quite frequently.
So, yes, the Board is wrong to make non-Members ASF Officers? And
from
where would you expect the missing education to come?
I think it has proven to be a mistake to allow any project to operate
without at least one ASF member actively involved in the project, since
the result is an island without new members.
That doesn't mean people need to be an ASF member to be involved in
incubation of a project -- they simply don't meet the required need
for a Mentor who is an ASF member.
A "need" imposed by no other agency than the Incubator PMC, itself.
A need imposed by the board when it created the Incubator with a given
purpose that cannot be achieved without a member in the loop.
....Roy
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