What kind of guidelines would you like to see?
What specific activities do you consider counterproductive, and how do you propose we improve them?
As much as your suggestions drive me towards a direction I'm already fully aware of, I think this situation is very comparable with the start of a new code-related project. If there's no code to play with, there's only a slim chance a community will form. I reckon much 'code' is already present within the Incubator project, still people do find it quite unobvious to start playing with it, because of its distributed character perhaps, or the unclear overall design. Much of the Incubator documents remain unfinished, which indeed creates a nice work area for people caring about the Incubator project. OTOH, the way the Incubator is being put forward happens to be very demotivational, especially for people who are already involved in various other ASF related efforts and find themselves being dragged into the Incubator project only circumstantial. There's a certain tendency to downplay ongoing incubation efforts if they are not fully executioned from within the reigns of the Incubator PMC, and one can get sick of hearing he should help the PMC instead of the incubating project. Don't underestimate the social aspect of all this. I know the Incubator is important for the ASF, but that doesn't mean one must become a committer of it or PMC member if he wants to help an incubating project.
The good thing of all this is that, by now, it's becoming crystal-clear (at least to me), that the Incubator project should really be a library of guidelines and nothing more. Since I'm much more of a hands-on guy rather than a rules builder, I'm finding it hard to focus on rules rather than on the problem at hand (= XMLBeans' incubation). This shouldn't be a problem if rules builders cooperate rather than point fingers, and someone tries to transcribe the efforts of the hand-on guys into a pragmatical set of rules. I'm very grateful to see Berin apparently trying to do so.
I'd rather collaborate rather than just comment, but I don't want to raise expectations which I can't meet after being admitted. Modesty.
(If you don't have CVS commit, ask for it. In the mean time, post patches if you see something that needs changing. The fastest way to get commit to *any* ASF project is to post so many patches to the development list that the committers can't keep up and eventually just give you direct access. :)
I'm fully aware of all that. I'm not a karma whore however, since I'm already pretty much occupied with my current karma. ;-)
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
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