On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 12:08 AM, Jakob Homan <jgho...@gmail.com> wrote: >> The "open enrollment" period has historically been controversial -- Crunch is >> not the first project to wrestle with it. > > Just to re-iterate, the issue with Crunch was not whether or not that > group decided to have an open enrollment or not. The issue was that > the announced policy to not have one was selectively ignored for one > volunteer versus another. After announcing its intention to go with a > closed enrollment, an exception was made: >> the consensus was that your background is uniquely valuable >> to the project, and that we would like to have you with us as an >> initial committer. > which is a fancy way of saying 'we're going to make an exception to > our own policy just for your case' - a pretty bad foot for a > merit-based effort to get off on.
The text of the entire email that Jakob is quoting from: "Thank you Vinod. I wasn't sure of the right protocol for this sort of thing, as my expectation was that the initial committers would be drawn from the people who had contributed to Crunch already. This thread from when S4 entered the incubator was particularly illuminating: http://markmail.org/message/aw54w4mhg4zfegpn After talking it over with my co-submitters, the consensus was that your background is uniquely valuable to the project, and that we would like to have you with us as an initial committer." There was not an email before that one that announced a policy (or even an opinion) with respect to open or closed enrollment, and the reference to the S4 thread only indicated that it was "illuminating," not that it was policy. I think that not making an explicit policy announcement was a mistake on our part, because the interpretation was ambiguous and that led directly to an ugly start for the project. At a minimum, I think it would be wise for the incubator documentation to tell new projects to announce a policy as part of their proposal, so that others do not make the same mistake. That announcement could be anything from "The initial committers will be made up exclusively from existing contributors" to "We would like to consider potential additional committers on a case-by-case basis" to "Anyone from the Apache community is welcome to join as an initial committer." Then there could be explicit discussion on the thread about the pros and cons of the project's choice before the proposal went to a vote. > > Open enrollment, closed enrollment or the hybrid you're suggesting all > can (or not) work fine because they're all fair rules for the new > group to build on. > -jakob > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org > -- Director of Data Science Cloudera Twitter: @josh_wills --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
