On 9/25/12 4:39 PM, Ian Lynch wrote: > The Apache Way came up on the PMC list thread. Is the Apache Way > exclusively about certain types of merit and not about any other > factor or attribute? It seems from what mentors have written that > community is a big part of the Apache Way and merit in building the > community is important as well as the characteristics needed to > sustain a strong community. The acknowledged problem with merit is > that it is difficult to be sure how to measure it, it seems to be more > a consensus thing. If two community members have similar merit and > there is only one place on the PMC, what determines which one is > chosen? We can't determine merit to a high degree of measured > precision. It is a strawman argument to say someone will be included > on the PMC without merit, that has never been a consideration. If we > assume all members of the PMC have appropriate merit, other > considerations will come into play and it seems to me that that has no > conflict with the Apache Way. >
I think that is clear to most people here and of course community building is an important part in an open source project. Not only at Apache and of course it is not really new. And I think we welcome anybody who will concentrate on this only and will help to grow our community. And we will welcome any kind of contribution in this area independent if it is a one time shot or a continuous and ongoing effort. And the really important part is how to recognize this contributions which is the challenge in any community. We learned at Apache that everything happened on the mailing list or didn't happened at all. Mmmh, very strange I think and from my perspective not always possible. But I believe that it is possible to wrap up any kind of action, contribution, activity that goes in community building or whatever on this mailing list that is the central place in our project according the Apache way. I expect that if we don't recognize this kind of contribution that people make us aware of it. We can't see anything, especially not when it is not reported or communicated here on the list by whomsoever. This is no failure as long as we take the appropriate actions afterwards. And I believe we don't have a limited count of seats (or places if you want to name it this way) in our PMC. If somebody merits the membership I hope we will recognize it over time. We are for sure not perfect yet and will never be but I am sure that we will learn and grow over time. Juergen
