Hi there, This is to announce my withdrawal from the Zope Toolkit steering group. I withdraw from the Zope Toolkit steering group for two reasons: * The steering group is not working as a group. Most steering group members haven't been doing much steering. This left me by myself to try to give direction. I cannot blame the others for committing their time differently, but this isn't the balance of work I signed up for. * Trying to steer the ZTK took a large amount of my energy. The discussions are quite draining and the benefit to me has not been worth the frustration. In the past year we've made large changes to the dependency structure of packages, cleaning it up. We've also improved compat testing and dependency analysis infrastructure a lot. That's the technical part. The community consequences are also important. We've been able to redefine the focus of various projects under the Zope umbrella. Separating the concern of the ZTK from Zope 3 made another refocusing project like BlueBream possible, and made more clear the relation Grok and Zope 2 have with the libraries in the ZTK. I think there is a lot more that can be done, but I don't want to feel responsible for it. Here is my analysis of problems with the ZTK: * Unclear leadership situation. I tried to resolve this by founding the ZTK project and steering group in the first place. Besides the time investment problems mentioned before, this (my?) leadership is also not fully accepted, or its judgment is not fully trusted. * Even though endless discussions take place, communication is frequently poor and frustrating at the same time. Bigger changes take too much energy to discuss. People give up even trying to cooperate and do it alone as it's a way to get things done. This creates a vicious cycle. * The commitment of parties to work together on the ZTK is fragile. Witness Zope 2 withdrawing from the ZTK quickly after some disagreements (with me). My commitment to leading the ZTK as a community project has now disappeared as well. I am primarily interested in the development of Grok. I came to the ZTK to tackle important issues for Grok, and now am going to focus my attention on Grok again. This means that I may contribute to the vicious cycle I mentioned above, but so be it. What this means for the ZTK or the steering group I do not know. The ZTK matters to me as a foundation to Grok. In a wider sense, I believe that a broader base of people using the ZTK is good for the Zope community and Grok as well. I also believe a person or group who offers leadership and has a final say is healthy for the project -- just random interested people voting -1 or +1 or -1000 or +1000 on the mailing list is a recipe for stagnation. We will have to see what the steering group, or anyone else, will come up with. I've tried to ignore zope-dev as much as possible recently, because I don't want to be dragged back into sometimes frustrating discussions. If you want to reach me you can email me or talk on grok-dev. Good luck, everybody. Martijn