[Zope-dev] the Zope Framework project

[Martijn Faassen]

Paul Everitt wrote:
> On 3/2/09 10:13 PM, Martin Aspeli wrote:
>> We recognised that there was a problem in trying to make sure we
>> represented the interests of various stakeholders, and that we needed
>> someone to think "big picture" in terms of what technologies we adopted
>> and how we used them.
> 
> Just to be clear, I believe the Plone framework team has specifically 
> disavowed management of Plone's "strategy".  Meaning, they approve PLIPs 
> on a release-to-release basis.  They don't make edicts like "replace 
> Archetypes".
> 
> This was the vacuum that the "strategic planning summit" advertised 
> itself as addressing.
> 
> I think this clarification is informative to Martijn's discussion.

That's interesting indeed.

It's hard to know whether Plone's method of a "strategic planning 
summit" is working on the long term as you only had one as far as I 
know. (though I did hear positive news about it). I do have the 
impression the framework team strategy works reasonably well; it's been 
operating for about 2 releases now?

So you have one mechanism to set long term directions (and I think 
another one, namely Alexander Limi), and another to execute these long 
term directions and make smaller decisions in the light of them.

In reality of course a lot of micro decisions can result in a long term 
direction, so there's a gray area there.

For the Zope Framework I think it's more important to get the day to day 
decision making working in our community than it is to do the long term 
setting of directions and planning. We do have some form of long term 
direction emerging that we can recognize often enough (though we can do 
a lot better still). The core problem in my mind is the day to day 
decision making and channeling of energies.

I myself am inclined, for the Zope Framework, to start with the day to 
day team. I think it can deduce at least some long term directions from 
the community on the mailing list and usage in practice (also by 
consultation). We could amend such a process with a strategic planning 
summit construction, later.

Regards,

Martijn