Happy to add detail on the origin of this from my side – At NGCC 2019 alongside ApacheCon in Las Vegas this year, I proposed the idea of periodic public video calls and an approach toward executing on the roles of product and release management as a community of volunteers. The thesis of the presentation was that "we can perform the functions of [product and release] management as volunteers and the project’s governance can help support it" (quoting my presenters' notes), attached.
The presentation also proposed periodic public video calls among contributors, and ideally among the user community: ––– * Public video calls – Moderated, published agenda, recorded, and hosts rotated. – Emcee owns timekeeping and execution of meeting agenda. – Low-fi: light on prep and production value. – Could be applied either among contributors or Cassandra users. ––– After the presentation, Patrick came up to me and generously offered to donate the use of a Zoom account to host such a call among contributors. A hypothetical agenda might look like covering the status of tickets screened to 4.0, the status of test/qualification plans on Confluence, a quick check-in on the 3.0 and 3.11 branches, and recognizing recent contributions from community members (such as thanking folks like Mick for the work he's done on CI). Patrick and I would be thrilled to help organize this and think such calls would help us work better together as contributors if the PMC values that as a contribution. So I may be responsible for this controversy – but I am proud to be if so. I apologize if we've gone about this improperly, but if so it's only because learning the proper way is terribly difficult - even when in regular conversation with many members of the PMC and including on this very topic. If the PMC would like to discuss privately how community members can be chartered to lead initiatives like discussions on scope and release management and/or periodic community calls, it looks like several in this thread would be eager to contribute. I believe that each contributor on this thread means well, and think it's essential we work toward every goal that's been stated in this thread. Link to slides in case attachments are stripped by the mailing list: https://github.com/ngcc/ngcc2019/blob/master/Committing%20to%20our%20Users%20-%20Product%20and%20Release%20Management%20in%20Apache%20Cassandra.pdf Cheers, – Scott ________________________________________ From: Benedict Elliott Smith <bened...@apache.org> Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 6:05 PM To: dev@cassandra.apache.org Subject: Re: Offering some project management services To be clear, as it seems like I'm being very negative here, I'm really pleased to see DataStax suddenly increase their participation, even if currently it's limited to administrative activities. But let's try really hard to do things in the right way. https://www.apache.org/foundation/governance/pmcs.html#meetings Community and meetings are explicitly within the intended purview of the PMC. The Cassandra PMC ordinarily implicitly devolves decision-making to the dev list, so a lack of formal role is no impediment to participation _here on the devlist_ but making decisions off-list amongst a cohort lacking _any_ formal members of the community is a particularly bad look IMO, and the kind of indifference to "The Apache Way" that lead to the fallout with DataStax many moons ago. In this case, Patrick said "we've decided we're running a contributor meeting on this date" which starts to look like an attempt - however unintentional - to make decisions about community and collaboration _for_ the project. Instead, IMO, presenting a clear proposal to the community about how this could happen, giving it due time to respond and consider (and probably mostly express gratitude!) is the right way to do it. It might lead to tweaks, it might lead to minor preconditions about process, it might lead to nothing. But that's how these kinds of things should happen, even ignoring the ASF stuff, if only out of politeness. On 11/01/2020, 01:52, "J. D. Jordan" <jeremiah.jor...@gmail.com> wrote: Isn’t doing such things the way people who are not writing code become part of a project? By offering their time to do things that benefit the project? Why does anyone “with a formal role” need to agree that Patrick is allowed to use his time to try and get some people together to discuss contributing? -Jeremiah Jordan Person with no formal role in the Apache Cassandra project. > On Jan 10, 2020, at 7:44 PM, Benedict Elliott Smith <bened...@apache.org> wrote: > > This is also great. But it's a bit of a weird look to have two people, neither of whom have formal roles on the project, making decisions like this without the involvement of the community. I'm sure everyone will be supportive, but it would help to democratise the decision-making. > > > On 11/01/2020, 01:39, "Patrick McFadin" <pmcfa...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Scott and I had a talk this week and we are starting the contributor > meetings on 1/22 as we talked about at NGCC. (Yeah that was back in > September) Stay tuned for the details and agenda in the project confluence > page. > > Patrick > >>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 3:21 PM Jeff Jirsa <jji...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 3:19 PM Jeff Jirsa <jji...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 2:35 PM Benedict Elliott Smith < >>> bened...@apache.org> wrote: >>>> Yes, I also miss those fortnightly (or monthly) summaries that Jeff >>>> used to do. They were very useful "glue" in the community. I imagine >> they'd >>>> also make writing the board report easier. >>>> +1, those were great >>> I'll try to either do more of these, or nudge someone else into doing >> them >>> from time to time. >> (I meant ^ if Josh doesnt volunteer. Would love to have Josh do them if >> he's got time). > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@cassandra.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@cassandra.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@cassandra.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@cassandra.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@cassandra.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@cassandra.apache.org
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