picking the first PMC chair

[Leo Simons <ma...@leosimons.com>]

Hey folks,

In graduating, a big item besides the various administrativa is
choosing who will be the first Jena PMC Chair,

    http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#pmc-chair

A PMC chair's primary role is serving as a communication bridge
between the apache board and the rest of the PMC. They subscribe to
the board@apache mailing list, they inform the board about new PMC
members, and they submit the quarterly report (*). They also handle
some other administrative stuff, for example I believe they still get
write access to the svn authorization file so they can add committers
to it after those have been brought on board.

The PMC chair is *not* in charge of project day to day activities;
remember apache runs as a meritocracy. Instead, the chair role is
mostly an administrative role, taking care of a few bureaucracy
thingies so the project can get on with doing its thing.

Formally, all PMC Chairs are Vice Presidents of the Foundation, which
means getting listed on

    http://www.apache.org/foundation/

and it can mean serving as the contact point for those people that
don't quite know how to engage an open source community. For example
journalists may get routed to the VP rather than to the mailing list.

Most projects consider it a good idea to rotate the PMC chair role
every year or two, sharing the administrative burden and exposing more
project members to another level of ASF governance.

To choose the first PMC chair, we should hold a discussion and a vote
on the private mailing list (*not* here, this e-mail is just to
explain the process). We'll then put the name of the first chair into
the board resolution that we'll need to write for graduation. However,
appointing PMC chairs and passing resolutions is done by the apache
board, so they always have final say on the matter. We're just
advising them.

To rotate out the PMC chair after a year or two, the PMC chair
themselves should start a discussion and eventual vote about that on
the private mailing list. If a new chair is picked by the project,
they should prepare a resolution for the board to change the chair.
The board will probably pass that resolution at their next meeting. If
not, you'll definitely hear about why :)


cheers,


Leo


(*) though reports are a chair responsibility, it's common practice to
collaboratively write the report on the wiki. You've already
experienced how that gets done for the incubator PMC report :-)