On community interactions

[Jukka Zitting <ju...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Since the question of committership came up, I was trying to look for
Tim Kim's recent contributions but couldn't find much on callback-dev@
or on the CB jira. However, looking at GitHub I find a number of
commits in [1] and at least some related discussion in [2]. Is that
work intended for inclusion in Cordova? More generally, how much of
such project work do you feel is happening outside the scope of
callback-dev@?

Apache projects have traditionally worked hard to bring all project
work and discussions to the relevant dev@ mailing list ("if it's not
on the mailing list, it didn't happen") and issue trackers (that send
update notifications to dev@). The good thing about this model is that
it's very easy for anyone to stay up to date on what's going on in the
project, which ultimately keeps the playing field level for all
contributors.

On the other hand I think there's a lot of value in the GitHub model
of being able to easily maintain and discuss alternative forks also on
a one-to-one level like was happening for example in [2].

So while I don't want to categorically prevent or discourage such
interactions outside the dev@ list, I'm a bit worried that they a)
don't establish a direct connection between the contributor and the
larger project community (for example for the purpose of considering
candidates for committership), and b) may blur the line on which
contributions are intended for inclusion in the project and which are
not (thus complicating tracking of code provenance).

Any ideas on how we could best address such issues?

[1] https://github.com/apache/incubator-cordova-blackberry-webworks/network
[2] https://github.com/gtanner/incubator-cordova-blackberry-webworks/pull/1
[3] https://github.com/apache/incubator-cordova-ios/network

BR,

Jukka Zitting

Re: On community interactions

[Brian LeRoux <b...@brian.io>]

I think this is more of a symptom of our heritage w/ the project
living on github. (And yes it remains an important channel for
contribution and community building so we def do not want to
discourage it!)


On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 4:24 PM, Jukka Zitting <ju...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since the question of committership came up, I was trying to look for
> Tim Kim's recent contributions but couldn't find much on callback-dev@
> or on the CB jira. However, looking at GitHub I find a number of
> commits in [1] and at least some related discussion in [2]. Is that
> work intended for inclusion in Cordova? More generally, how much of
> such project work do you feel is happening outside the scope of
> callback-dev@?
>
> Apache projects have traditionally worked hard to bring all project
> work and discussions to the relevant dev@ mailing list ("if it's not
> on the mailing list, it didn't happen") and issue trackers (that send
> update notifications to dev@). The good thing about this model is that
> it's very easy for anyone to stay up to date on what's going on in the
> project, which ultimately keeps the playing field level for all
> contributors.
>
> On the other hand I think there's a lot of value in the GitHub model
> of being able to easily maintain and discuss alternative forks also on
> a one-to-one level like was happening for example in [2].
>
> So while I don't want to categorically prevent or discourage such
> interactions outside the dev@ list, I'm a bit worried that they a)
> don't establish a direct connection between the contributor and the
> larger project community (for example for the purpose of considering
> candidates for committership), and b) may blur the line on which
> contributions are intended for inclusion in the project and which are
> not (thus complicating tracking of code provenance).
>
> Any ideas on how we could best address such issues?
>
> [1] https://github.com/apache/incubator-cordova-blackberry-webworks/network
> [2] https://github.com/gtanner/incubator-cordova-blackberry-webworks/pull/1
> [3] https://github.com/apache/incubator-cordova-ios/network
>
> BR,
>
> Jukka Zitting