[Zope-dev] the Zope Framework project

[Lennart Regebro]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 00:16, Martijn Faassen <faassen at startifact.com> wrote:
> Who is going to make that decision to encourage this? Allow this? You?
> Me? Who? Right now, *nobody* is making such decisions and nobody can
> properly get away with saying they allow it. Leadership is a way to get
> out of it.

I think open source in general has shown two things:

1. Communities can mostly take decisions without having official
authorities to do so. This is hyper democratic.
2. When they can't, usually committees can't either. In those cases
somebody with a deciding vote is needed. This isn't democratic at all,
but efficient.

I think we should think about have offical groups, but for clear
tasks. Such as a "Zope 3.6 Release Task Force" as a hypothetical
example. It needs to be more than just Stephan Richter. But it should
be for a small, well defined specific task, and they are responsible
not for steering, but for kicking ass! (Their own or others. [So
things get done, you see. {Small joke there. Wasn't very funny was it?
Ah well.}])

> +1, though a simple discouraging of utterance can't accomplish it by
> itself. What you need is active leadership that encourages such
> experimentation.

I don't know about that. I agree with you that there hasn't been
active leadership for a while. But look what has happened without this
active leadership.
* We have two cool new Zope 3 based frameworks. One which throws out
the whole concept of ZCML for doing configuration by radical code
introspection, and as a result making the Zope Framework immensely
more accessible. And another one which experiments with revamping the
way Zope publishes things, and a related effort of rewriting the whole
publisher. Both frameworks have during these experimentation reached
big audiences and gained widespread if still experimental acceptance
in the community.
* Zope 2 has been eggified.
* Buildout has totally massacred all other forms of deployment of Zope projects.

I think experimentation has been if anything more wild than any time
before in my life as a Zopista. I don't think active leadership is
needed to encourage experimentation. I think all that is needed it
what we already have: A less monolithic framework where you can do
wild stuff, together with some seriously smart and wild people.

And we don't need leadership to say which of the experiments to make
non-experimental. That will come automatically. We do need leadership
for making decisions where the community ends up 50/50. In those
cases, most committees will as well. And no, a 3 against 4 vote in a
committee is not a success.

> Who decides to kill something off?

If it doesn't get maintained, is dead. I guess you want somebody to
make it official. I'm not sure it's necessary in a component based
reality. With Zope 2 eggified for example, ZClasses gets a separate
module, and it lives as long as somebody maintains it. It's then just
a matter of deciding if it should be a part of the release or not,
which the release manager(s) decide.

> Who decides we should have a documentation website for a widely used
> component.

Those who writes the documentation in question. :)

> To people who are suggesting we don't need a steering group nor a name
> for the Zope Framework, please answer the following questions:
>
> * how will the community make hard decisions where lots of people
> disagree?

How does the steering committee make hard decisions where lots of
people disagree? If we can't get a serious consensus on something, and
it MUST be decided, then we have a problem no matter what we do. The
traditional open source solution is a benevolent dictator. If that's
not decided, then in worst case have a vote amongst committer members.
How often has this been a problem the last couple of years?

> * who reminds us of necessary tasks and directions we're going into?
> Sometimes the community collectively decides on moving forward.
> Sometimes it doesn't. Are we really maintaining our issue tracker well, say?

No, but then a person should get some sort of responsibility for that.
Note: A person. Not a committee. A committee means a bunch of people
are responsible, which is the same thing as saying that nobody is.


Yeah, yeah , I know. My answer is all peace and love and fluffy
kittens and everybody does whatever they want, but amazingly, it tends
to work! :-) Freedom baby yeah!

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Pythonista, Barista, Notsotrista.
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
+33 661 58 14 64