Martijn Dashorst wrote:
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 5:42 AM, J Aaron Farr<fa...@apache.org> wrote:
If a community meets all the criteria, but hasn't discovered a new
committer (or two) by itself, is the community ready for graduation?
If not, how can we—mentors— nudge the community to focus on this
thing, without it becoming an exercise in "checking the check marks"?
There are at least two scenarios:
Yup, but I'd like to add a third one:
- the podling has voted in a new committer, but only because the
committer was 'discovered' by the mentors
Whoever 'discover' the new committer is irrelevent, IMO.
Now, regarding the 2 scenarii Aaron listed, the first one is probably
the most problematic. The second one is likely not an issue, as a
project entering incubation is generally coming from the outside with a
community (somehow) as it should be accepted only with an existing codebase.
So if the people are relucting to vote in a contributor, it may be the
mentor's role to suggest doing so. The reason people don't want to vote
some new committer, beside the contribution's quality, is this
'ownership' feeling the people have to swallow. Not easy. When you have
worked years on a project, finally got it accepted in incubation, and
see newcomers posting new code, it's not easy to accept the idea that
you don't own the code anymore.
It is hard work to keep track of contributors and identify those with
enough merit, when you are busy solving licensing issues, releasing
and trying to keep your project going.
But OTOH, it's easy to track a new contributor, see if he/she is keeps
going (just looking at the mailing list, not necessarily evaluating the
technical merit), and at some point, just ask the committers about the
level of quality of those contributions. Then asking for a vote, or at
least proposing it.
Wouldn't a community only be
ready when they themselves are capable of looking beyond their own
coding, contemplate what's happening in their community and take
necessary action?
Probably.
While I understand that Mentors should prod the community into action
at times, but shouldn't Mentors also take a step back and let the
community become enlightened by themselves?
Well, we should not consider mentors as doers, not as flies around the
cake. We are shepherds, here : we give directions, try to avoid
mistakes, explain 'the apache way', and help as much as we can. If we
don't do that, and let the community educating itself, I guess that it
will go right in some walls more often than necessary... IMHO, of course.
Martijn
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cordialement, regards,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com
directory.apache.org
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