On Mar 5, 2007, at 12:06 PM, Eugene Eric Kim wrote:
With this in mind, I have a clarifying question for Bill and Ted. I
think Apache's policy for being email-driven is spot-on, and it's
consistent with general collaborative best practices for
communities that
have both strong local and geographically dispersed demographics.
At the
same time, I know that Apache hosts several projects that were
contributed by companies and that continue to be actively driven by
employees at these companies. How have they dealt with the
challenges of
balancing face-to-face versus email? I can't imagine that Sun and
IBM,
for example, do zero face-to-face design work, although I suspect that
they also report-out very aggressively to the mailing lists.
Could you elaborate on how other companies have dealt with the
face-to-face versus asynchronous challenge with other Apache projects?
At the ASF, all decisions must be made in the public mailing lists.
You can talk offlist as much as you want, but the decision needs to
be made on the list. So if you have any committers outside of your
organization, you will have to convince them to vote for your design,
or not to veto code that was never discussed. Aggressive reporting
or use of logged mediums (such as IRC) can help with this process,
but whenever you go offlist. In the end, in successful projects,
people learn to use e-mail.
Again I'd recommend Karl Fogel's excellent Producing Open Source
Software <http://producingoss.com/> as a practical guide for working
in an open source project -- Karl is not an ASF person, but he is
major contributor to Subversion, which uses ASF like practices, and
which was developed (initially) under the auspices of a company.
Ted
