On 07/11/2016 10:52, Benedict Elliott Smith wrote: > Hi Mark, > > Thanks, that was a calm and diplomatic email. > > recognise where they might need to apologise > > > I will start the ball rolling here, as I have not always been generous in > my interpretations of others' actions, and have certainly contributed to > escalation. > > But I wonder if you would also help get the ball rolling; your reasonable > tone gives me hope that you can. The topic for me has been: can board > members recognise publicly where they have misstepped. Doing so provides > assurances to the whole ASF community that the board can be trusted. > > https://www.mail-archive.com/user@cassandra.apache.org/msg48692.html > > In this email chain not long ago, you attempted to apply a misreading of > the ASF guidelines to non-ASF individuals. When I pointed this out, you > went silent. In that chain, as now, I had a righteous indignation that no > doubt inflamed the topic, and could have resolved the issue with more > diplomacy. I'm also sure you had excellent intentions. > > Nevertheless, you did misstep as a board member by quite badly misapplying > the guidelines. With no public recognition of this, I was left with an > impression of unaccountability; I don't know how others responded.
Benedict, First of all, let me explain why I didn't respond. That particular sub-thread had all the indications that it was heading towards the same sort of heated, unproductive, negative discussion that has been observed recently on this list. I wanted to avoid that. It is possible that the tone could have been turned around with the right e-mail but writing those e-mails takes time that I didn't have. I therefore took the option to simply ignore your email. It might not have been the perfect choice but it did mean that the heated discussion was avoided and I had more time for other ASF things, both inside Apache Cassandra and outside. Clearly you are unhappy about how you view my actions in that thread. I believe that that is primarily due to a misunderstanding. Let me try and correct that by providing more explanation and context. I could have, and with hindsight should have, provided that explanation and context at the time. Had I done so, I think the misunderstanding could have been avoided. Consider that a lesson learned. One of the topics at the August board meeting was the continuing concerns that had been raised with the board (from various sources both within the project and externally) regarding Apache Cassandra. There was a generally productive discussion between the board and the PMC members who attended the meeting and one of the points made by the PMC was that, while they agreed that there were issues, they were unsure what they could/should be doing to address them. The PMC asked if the board could provide a set of concrete actions it expected from the PMC. As a board member who had not been directly involved in Cassandra to that point, I volunteered to review the various threads discussing the concerns, put together the list of actions and provide the Cassandra PMC with a point of contact if they had any questions or concerns as they worked through those actions. I provided the list to the PMC towards the end of August. Around the same time I subscribed to all of the Apache Cassandra mailing lists. This was primarily to monitor the PMC's progress with their actions. One of the things I quickly noticed was that many users required additional resources (reference docs, how to guides, components, tools) over and above that provided directly by the project. While individually, none of these resources gave cause for concern, collectively, I was left with a perception of the project not being as firmly rooted at the ASF as it could/should be. Getting to the thread in question, it resonated with the perception I had of the project not being firmly rooted at the ASF. A user was being directed to 3rd party docs rather than the official Apache Cassandra docs and it appeared that the official docs were better (more up to date / complete). I did not intend to suggest Ryan was trying to do anything but help a user. My intention was to try and understand why/how it had happened with a view to improving things going forward. If I left Ryan in particular or anyone else with the impression that I thought Ryan was somehow at fault, I apologise. I did not then, and do not now, think Ryan did anything wrong. Ryan's explanation made perfect sense. I still think it is worth the project looking at whether there is any SEO tuning that can be done to improve the search ranking of cassandra.a.o for "CQL" (and any other terms relevant to the project). I say this because other Apache projects I have been involved have been able to improve their search ranking with various web-site tweaks. I don't know enough about SEO to know if those tweaks would help Cassandra. I would have pursued this more at the time but I read the second paragraph of the response to my SEO enquiry as antagonistic and therefore, for the reasons I outlined above, I opted to ignore it. Re-reading that response with the benefit of a little distance, the second paragraph could just as easily be read as humorous. As of this moment I genuinely have no idea which was intended but I'm going to go with humorous. The other sub-thread that this spawned is the one you linked above. My understanding is that you view my response as saying that Ryan's e-mail was against ASF policy and he should have known better. I can see how you reached that conclusion but that wasn't what I was trying to say. I could have and should have been clearer and I apologise for the misunderstanding caused. The point I was trying to make was that the motivation behind me asking the original question was driven by The Apache Way / ASF Policy and not personal opinion about what communities should and should not do. Taken in isolation, I had no issue with the e-mail from an ASF policy perspective. Taken in combination with all the other threads I had read on the Apache Cassandra mailing lists, I was concerned (and still am) about the perception I got of the project not being fully rooted at the ASF. Or to put it another way, the perception that the project is not as independent of external entities as it should be. This relates directly to the concept of project independence that I linked to. The community using links to external docs in preference to the project hosted docs was one of the symptoms I was observing around the perception of insufficient independence. I wanted to understand how it had come about to see if there was something concrete that the PMC could do to reduce the instances of this happening and thereby reduce one of the factors giving rise to the perception that the project was not sufficiently independent. I think it would have been better if I had started a new thread (with some background) to discuss the general issue rather than following up on the thread that happened to be in front of me when the concern crystallised. I think that would have helped decouple the original thread from my general concern. The separation was clear in my mind but I obviously didn't do enough to make that clear to others. Consider that another lesson learned. I hope this e-mail helps address the concerns you have. Mark
