BJ Freeman wrote:
If this is truly a community, and there are people involved that really have knowledge about something, What is the Hierarchy of Decisions based on the ASF way?Or is this a vialed attempt to look like a community with only one persons Making the decisions.From what I have seen certain individuals do commit and contribute, without a problem. So this is not a one man show.What seems to be the questions is the guidelines for making decisions. it is truly a community when all seem to have access to the guidelines.I think getting a set of guidelines for all to have access to would alleviate the pressure felt when there is an disagreement.
I'm not sure what sort of guidelines would be applicable here. Because of human nature the possible problems arising are nearly limitless...Still, I guess the basic structure is simple. The committers make the decisions. Of course, part of the responsibility of being a committer (as described in the OFBiz Committers Roles and Responsibilities page, linked to below), is facilitating community interaction and contributions, so a lot of this "decision making" is just review, feedback, and a yes or no decision on whether a patch is ready or not.
So no, committers don't drive everything that happens in the project, but they are the filter that everything goes through to try to keep the project clean and vital. I'll talk more about the already established guidelines below.
I have purchased the Vol 1 and II and will begin reading them this winter, maybe on the train ride to Portland.
Which volumes are these? I'm not aware of any books (especially specific to OFBiz) that talk about decision making guidelines like this... Actually there are some books about managing open source projects that are interesting, like: "Producing Open Source Software" by Karl Fogel Note that this is a very general book and is not necessarily about the ASF way or the way things are done in OFBiz. It is good general commentary and I've found it interesting and helpful. It is available for download (I have a PDF sitting on my machine), but I don't remember exactly where I downloaded.
So if there are other documents that are involved, I will purchase or read those.Just point me to the documents that define the framework for decision making on this project.
The best documents about this for ASF are on the ASF site itself. There are quite a few things to read through in different places, but a good place to start is: http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html The whole page is good, but the Meritocracy section is especially important. One things to keep in mind with OFBiz is that much of the software is business automation oriented and not technical in nature. You'll see a lot of stuff written about Linux and other very technically oriented projects and those are good places to start, but I've found that certain variations on those are very important for more business oriented open source projects, especially the very few such projects that are community rather than corporate driven. So, in other words, read lightly and consider it input to be refined and then applied. There are some OFBiz specific pages that have recently been established that cover these sorts of guidelines, so here they are: http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/OFBiz+Committers+Roles+and+Responsibilities http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/OFBiz+Contributors+Best+Practices A good source of information, BTW, is just glancing at the mailing list messages every so often. These documents, for example, and the direct result of discussions on the dev list and were announced there as well. -David
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