[Zope-dev] quitting the ZTK steering group

[Martijn Faassen]

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