I received a bunch of comments about me being "on the list" lately, mostly
positive saying that a "moderator" was so much needed on servlet-interest.
Well, let me tell you one thing, I never heard about this list until Danny,
the spec lead, "offloaded" it on me, and asked me to play the moderator...
I started in November lurking, and posting a couple of stuff, this last
week, fairly enough, I had some spare time to dedicate to it, and I red a
couple of messages who made me see that things were not going...
Then Milt Epstein (I believe it was him), posted me an idea, why not having
the policies on line, so that anyone could have pointed them out. I took
what Danny wrote quite some time ago, HTMLized, and posted on my home
machine.
Now, I'm not here to enforce anything, I don't like to be the "ruler"
especially of an open forum, where everyone is welcome to come and talk, but
definitely someone needs to take a clear point ad say "this is allowed" and
"this is not".
I spent the last 5 years of my life on open source projects, mostly on
Apache stuff (first JServ, then Cocoon, now Tomcat) and what we have in that
place is the concept of "community". Anyone can come, post code, fixes,
comments, ideas, and those make up a successful product.
Our product here is "knowledge", it's a mailing list, an open forum, but it
seems that we're far from building a community. There are long time friends,
like Nic Ferrier who follow the list daily and are great contributors, but
we are not a community. In "Borg" terms (can you tell I like Star Trek?) we
are individuals, while in my opinion we should be more like a collective.
I'd like all of you to go ahead and read the "rules" I posted yesterday, and
send comments, NOT TO ME, to the list itself, let everyone see what you
think and what you want, let's discuss those rules and improve them, so that
everyone will be happy with them. And when we get to an agreement, I'd like
to see each of you pointing out at our self-imposed rules and enforce them,
don't be shy to tell "hey, keep your long-ass press release out of this
list", or "check the archive because that question was answered last week".
Let's try to build a community around this incredible bunch of hundreds of
people, and let's make this community become something _really_ useful and
likable.
Also, post ideas, what you want to see around here. An example, Anantha
Krishnan (the guy I played 20 "Google" questions with two days ago) asked me
if it was possible to come up with a "code repository" of examples and
tools, we all have bandwidth and on-line megabytes to waste, do you think
it's needed? Would you like to have it? Or would you rather see a FAQ system
on which anyone can contribute? Send over your ideas, and if we all agree on
them, we can find some volunteer between us to make them become reality.
Let's work on this thing, on Apache we are delivering code, here we are
producing "knowledge", we have a wonderful technology called Java and we all
want it to be successful, or do you want to go back and code CGI in C or
PERL again?
Let's build _the_ servlet users community...
Pier
BTW, I'll still be the "moderator", but in case you didn't understand it, I
want to "offload" this job on each of you guys.... :) Money for nothing :)
--
Pier Fumagalli - Sun Microsystems, INC - <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I'm selling my Sony Vaio Z505. Check out <http://www.betaversion.org/~pier/>
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