Roy T. Fielding wrote:
At some point we need to make a distinction between creating
mailing lists/forums and creating self-governing groups responsible
for building products. Which one falls under the name "community"?
+1!!!!
IMHO, IAC!
I thought I had a handle on this community thing when we launched the
OpenSolaris "ON Community" - a group of people involved with the
"source tree formerly known as the Solaris Kernel Consolidation".
The proto-governance proposals floating around all made sense to me
when used in that context, though it was easy to imagine other equally
as useful interpretations. My "sanity test" was whether the following
phrase rang true:
The community consists of the movers and shakers (aka maintainers)
who are steering, architecting, designing, implementing and sustaining
the codebase in question.
This implies (to me) that a community is something bigger than a single
bugfix, yet smaller than an entire distro. My experience with things at
Sun leads me to associate "a community" with the abstraction we call a
"consolidation", and not with smaller "projects" or larger "products".
NB: The jury is still out as to whether or not this association is valid.
It could be that the thing we currently have is "too big" to be a single
community, and needs to be refactored into smaller abstractions. Some
possibilities that come to mind are splitting out drivers, filesystems,
posix/gnu utils and the core kernel/networking stacks - each would have
its own community driving its growth, independent of the others. Or not.
Then came the explosion of mailing lists and forums on the web site. They
were also called communities, yet not all were focused on things that were
directly tied into "identifiable pieces of code".
So, for once[1] I find myself in complete agreement with Roy! We need to
define some basic terms so we don't confuse ourselves even more!
-John
--------
[1] I think Roy and I are much more in agreement than it may appear in
those other areas as well - to paraphrase, we seem to be two vocal
engineers separated by a common language :-)
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