My Situation

[Kimbro Staken <ks...@xmldatabases.org>]

Since there have been several comments about the community stagnating, I 
wanted to clarify my current situation and why I'm unable to participate 
at any significant level right now.

I recently decided that I want to pursue becoming a college professor. In 
pursuit of that goal I'm having to completely restructure my life so that 
I can return to school to begin putting the pieces in place. This means I'
m massively distracted trying to get everything in order before I move in 
two weeks. This combined with my current consulting clients doesn't leave 
much time to focus on this project. Fortunately, my research focus is 
going to be XML data management so once I get things settled, I'll be able 
to get some focus back here. Hopefully I can get things back inline within 
a month or two.

Sorry I wasn't able to get the community onto a more firm footing before 
getting pulled away. I tried, but have been really distracted for quite 
some time while making what was a very difficult decision. It turns out 
building a consulting business, trying to keep this project moving, trying 
to keep the XML:DB Initiative alive and deciding where you want to be in 
life ten years from now was a little more then I could handle.

Fortunately, James, Kurt and Gianugo are participating on an increasing 
level and I hope they'll continue to increase their involvement. Maybe 
what this project really needs is for Tom and I to get out of the way for 
a while. Tom already seems to be pretty much unavailable and I haven't 
been much better lately, so I guess we'll find out even if we may not want 
to.

Xindice plays an important part in my plans for the next few years so I'm 
definitely planning to get back to contributing code again, but for a 
little while I probably won't be able to do much more then follow the 
mailing lists.

Kimbro Staken
Java and XML Software, Consulting and Writing http://www.xmldatabases.org/
Apache Xindice native XML database http://xml.apache.org/xindice
XML:DB Initiative http://www.xmldb.org