On 03/04/2013 08:31 AM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) wrote: > One thing to remember here: Apache conversations should happen on > Apache lists. While many ASF projects do use some form of real > time communication, all decisions must be made on the ASF mailing > lists. > > Talking in person, or in IRC without a log of what happened > excludes contributors who are not part of that conversation from > the same interaction level. It's also subject to time zones and > other things that Apache and its consensus and voting and decision > processes are meant to deal with. > > So, IOW, IRC is fine, but most of the conversation and *all* of > the decisions happen here on the list.
Thumbs up on all that! The timezone issue is a bummer, but c'est la vie. On Mifos (another project I spent lots of time on and just yell at me if I bring it up too often), we were generally able to find a few hours of overlap, even for very disparate timezones. And I didn't mind popping on late at night for a few minutes to check any messages I missed and reply, say hi, etc. Here's what we use for decision-making, by the way: https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/RES/Decider+via+Email Similar to ASF except we defaulted to a 24-hour window instead of 72 hours. I find IRC quite handy for quick questions, brainstorming, and idle chatter. When I approach a new FLOSS project, I generally check to see how many participants they have on their IRC channel. I also lurk for a while and ask questions if I have any. Full disclosure: I was recently interviewing at Twitter, and one of the things they asked me to provide was plans for improving the Mesos community. One of my suggestions was creating an IRC channel because I feel it greatly adds to the approachability of a FLOSS project.
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
