Ant is reflecting a real dilemma here. At Apache, we try to be egalitarian, and we try to work by consensus. The natural conclusion is that the many people needed to vote on releases are also part of the decision-making body for policy that controls those releases. The dilemma is that consensus doesn't always scale so well. Neither does supervision: when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.
There are several directions to go to on this. Chris M's proposal dissolves the IPMC into many, small, egalitarian communities, and leaves overarching policy for the board and comdev, where it lives for all the other projects. Ross' proposal sacrifices some egalitarianism to achieve better scaling of both decision-making and supervision. Ross' other proposal :-), to move documentation (and thus some/much of the locus of policy decision) making to comdev, reduces the load of decision-making that the IPMC has to find consensus on, and thus proposes to reduce the stress. I sense that Chris M finds my writing on his proposal frustrating. To try to do a better job of explaining myself: Chris proposes that this committee recommend its own demise to the board, to be replaced, in large part, by the board itself. Every board member who has been heard from so far has been less than enthusiastic. It's one thing for this community to self-govern, but self-destruction strikes me as outside of the mandate. It just strikes me as sideways to seek consensus inside a community that the community is incapable of reliable reaching consensus, amongst other things. If I believed that the IPMC was unfixably nonfunctional in supervision or decision-making, I wouldn't be seeking a consensus. I'd be reporting my view to the board, making a recommendation, and asking for direction. That's how I see my duty as an officer. In other words, if there's something functional to be the chair of, my job is to be the chair of it. If there's nothing functional to be the chair of, it's my job to say so, recognizing that the board might just disagree. Now that we've cleared up some other matters, I'll try to help us all discover if we have a consensus on one of these proposals. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
