On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 05:32 PM, Stephen McConnell wrote:
Aaron Bannert wrote:On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 08:52 AM, Stephen McConnell wrote:
As soon as you let a PMC make decisions behind closed doors - then your asking for trouble. A PMC is there to handle either (a) dull, boring, mindless administrata, or (b) nasty stuff that you really don't want to know about. Anything in between should be for the community to decide and if that causes some flack - so be it.
Again, this is incorrect and very misleading.
:-)
Aaron - it's only my opinion.
While you may think it is wrong relative to you interpritation of the roles and responsibilities of a PMC, the comments are not incorrect - they are simply an opinion.
As to misleading - that comes down to your objective. If your objective
is community engineering within an open source project then yes, my
observations would clearly be misleading as thay imply problems related
to a club mentality which would naturally be counter-productive. On the
otherhand, if your aiming for a structure within which decisions are
transparent and function is oriented to facilitating[1] and
representing[2] a community[3] - then perhaps you could consider the
same observations as engaging, embrassing, even ... enabling[4].
I didn't mean for that to come out so strongly, but I don't think it's right to portray the PMC in such a negative way. I'd prefer that we point out what the benefits of PMC membership are, and encourage project contributors to see membership in their project's PMC.
Here's the part I thought was misleading:
A PMC is there to handle either (a) dull, boring, mindless administrata, or (b) nasty stuff that you really don't want to know about.
And here's the part I thought was incorrect (although I admit I didn't see that it said "should be" before, so I take back what I said about it being incorrect :)
Anything in between should be for the community to decide and if that causes some flack - so be it.
Anyway, yes, now that I reread what you wrote here, I totally agree. The community should decide all the in-between stuff. At the ASF, however, the community that wishes to make those kinds of decisions should aspire to join the PMC.
-aaron
