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
Martijn Faassen <faassen@startifact.com> wrote:
Hi there,
This is to announce my withdrawal from the Zope Toolkit steering group.
I'm not sure if you're reading this, but I wanted to thank you anyway for the tremendous amount of energy you've put into the steering group. kind regards, jw
Jan-Wijbrand Kolman wrote:
Martijn Faassen<faassen@startifact.com> wrote:
Hi there,
This is to announce my withdrawal from the Zope Toolkit steering group.
I'm not sure if you're reading this, but I wanted to thank you anyway for the tremendous amount of energy you've put into the steering group.
I too am sorry to see you make this decision. A lot of good things have happened to Zope in the past year or so, and I think you've been a catalyst for many, if not most of those. I hope we'll continue to see you here, if only as a stakeholder from the Grok community. Thanks for all the energy and common sense you've added to the many lengthy discussions we've had on this list. ;) Martin -- Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book
* Martijn Faassen <faassen@startifact.com> [2010-01-22 22:27]:
This is to announce my withdrawal from the Zope Toolkit steering group.
I'm saddened to hear this. I feel that many if not all of the things you were trying to set in motion in our community are desperately needed. I'm sorry to hear that you have been worn out trying. Thanks for all the energy you've put into this. Wolfgang
Hi, I'm just putting in some 0.02EUR here to give some feedback about the current state. On 01/22/2010 10:27 PM, Martijn Faassen wrote:
Hi there,
This is to announce my withdrawal from the Zope Toolkit steering group.
I'm also sad to see you go -- hopefully with the chance of seeing you back and taking this as a motivation to improve zope-dev in a way that might make you come back in some future. ;) (I'll address the zope-dev list in the remainder of the post, so please excuse me for addressing you in third person from now on.)
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.
I agree with Martijn that we didn't get the steering group going as well as we thought. We haven't analyzed the issue yet, one part being that Martijn was able to act much more timely than Jim, Stephan and I are able to. I think this has to do with too little communication going on within the steering group (one of the founding premises was to do as little "backroom" communication as possible which ended up in no backroom communication, which IMHO doesn't allow us to function as a group).
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.
As much as I admire the amount of work that Martijn was able to put although it wasn't sustainable I think that the point of the steering group can't be to micro-manager discussions about larger improvements. I'm happy to see long discussions going on in general, but at least I don't have the ability to follow them right away. I think we need to balance speed with other qualities of our process. For one example: I didn't yet read the thread about the reversing of changes in the SVN. But honestly reverting someones work that wasn't agreed upon before is perfectly fine. SVN doesn't loose those changes anyway and if you don't get reverted then we were able to act quicker than having lengthy discussions at all times. Right now, I think I need to ponder the structure for a while and discuss with Stephan and Jim how they think about what's happened. Christian -- Christian Theune · ct@gocept.com gocept gmbh & co. kg · forsterstraße 29 · 06112 halle (saale) · germany http://gocept.com · tel +49 345 1229889 0 · fax +49 345 1229889 1 Zope and Plone consulting and development
On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 11:20, Christian Theune <ct@gocept.com> wrote:
I think this has to do with too little communication going on within the steering group (one of the founding premises was to do as little "backroom" communication as possible which ended up in no backroom communication, which IMHO doesn't allow us to function as a group).
The positive thing to take out of this is how well things have worked anyway. Apparently the Steering Group did not work as a group, but things got steered pretty well anyway. Admittedly through intense slogging on email lists, but that would have happened without the steering group as well. This community builds a loose sort of almost-consensus about the future by long discussions on zope-dev, and that's OK. People then act, or not, based on that almost-consensus. The steering group acknowledged this from the start by saying that discussions should be in the open, so as not to leave the rest of the community in the dark. And even if the steering group didn't work, this process has worked, although possibly through insane amounts of work on Martijns part. Without that work, the process will probably be a lot slower. But it will still work. So no reason for panic. :) So again, Martijn, thanks for trying so hard with the steering group. Even if the group didn't make a difference, you did, and with or without the group, I'm sure you will continue to make that difference. But now we need to look forward towards 4.0 of the ZCA. Onwards and upwards! :-) -- Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok http://regebro.wordpress.com/ +33 661 58 14 64
participants (6)
-
Christian Theune -
Jan-Wijbrand Kolman -
Lennart Regebro -
Martijn Faassen -
Martin Aspeli -
Wolfgang Schnerring