[eclipse.org-architecture-council] Updating the EDP and more

[Gunnar Wagenknecht <gunnar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Esteemed Council Members,

The Eclipse Development Process hasn't received a significant update in the last three years. It's about time to start looking at our process, identify issues and gaps, collect new requirements and turn it into a new revision of the EDP. In terms of timeline, I think it would be good to give us a couple months and have everything ready later this year for board review and approval.

I'd like to propose giving the update process a bit of a structure. While I do expect this list to be the major hub for discussions, I think it's important that we track the goals and items that we'd like to address. Personally, I find emails to be the worst for backlog management. I also like to see the update process be as open and as transparent as possible. Therefore I'm proposing to collaborate on the new revision within a public GitHub repository.

This proposal is based on my past experience managing Engineering process/policies in GitHub. It's based on a talk I've seen and I really like. I recommend everyone to watch it: 

Changing the Laws of Engineering with GitHub Pull Requests
https://bit.ly/pull-request-your-culture


I also like to ensure that all forges and communities are included in this process. Especially with EE4J and Jakarta EE, we have a large new community coming to Eclipse. I love that the EDP is at the core of the Eclipse community. As such, I'd like to ensure that the EDP is ready and successful for anyone in the Eclipse community. I also like to look at the AC and identify gaps and ways to allow anyone to be heard and to participate in those discussions.


FWIW, over the last couple of days I started by converting the current revision of the EDP into AsciiDoc because I think this will be much easier to propose and discuss potential updates/changes. I'd also like to make use of GitHub issues for managing the backlog and tracking progress on what we are doing. This is purely opinionated based on the easy of use of those.

https://github.com/eclipse-architecture/eclipse-development-process

I outline a rough plan here:
https://github.com/eclipse-architecture/eclipse-development-process/issues/1

DISCLAIMER: this all is a draft, a proposal at the moment. I'd like to show a direction this could be going.


If you think this is useful, I'm volunteering to drive the next major revision of the EDP together with you to completion. This means I'm volunteering to take on the AC chair for this year, focusing on the two major topics ahead of us: updating the EDP and broadening the AC.

Happy to have a conversation! I'll make sure to dial into our regular scheduled call next Thursday. But feel free to also ask via email or on the mailing list if you cannot wait or attend the call.

-Gunnar


-- 
Gunnar Wagenknecht
gunnar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://guw.io/