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[stem-dev] Project Communication

With the recent changes to the STEM committer ranks, I think we have an opportunity as an Eclipse project to communicate more effectively within our group, and more importantly with the greater Eclipse development community. We now have a more diverse and geographically dispersed set of committers. This, I think, warrants a re-examination of how we are communicating project issues, design decisions, and other project information.

Currently, we have a weekly phone call which I started a few years ago when the project was much smaller. That was useful then and it still helps to "socialize" the team members with each other, but as a channel for effective communication, it has a very narrow bandwidth. For instance, last Wednesday's call was all of 32 minutes long, it had nine participants and "discussed" nine different topics, that's less than four minutes per a topic. Unfortunately, the three new committers on the project were not able to attend. The timing of the call at 1pm EDT is also a problem, it is good for North America, but not necessarily good for any place else. I know there are Australian Researchers, who have contacted me about joining the project, for whom that time is particularly bad, and, as a result, they are not regular participants on the call. Also, listening to the last call, I heard a number of issues I haven't heard discussed previously in any other context or channel. The issue of what to do with the level-3 data was one. I am the original author of that data set and am familiar with the context that surrounds it, but in the short time span of a quick call, it is difficult to understand, discuss and then offer a considered opinion on the issue. That's why I requested Jamie to post the issue to stem-dev, thanks Jamie! The "branching" issue is also a new one, at least for me. I'm not sure exactly what the issue is, and I haven't seen any discussion about it in any other context, so it is hard to offer an opinion or expertise. I know from experience, for instance, that branching in SVN, our current repository, has a fair degree of "cognitive overhead" (i.e., you gotta think about it to get it right, and you have to continue to think about it to keep it right), where as branching and maintaining branches in Git is particularly easy and automatic. Again, it is hard to discuss the merits of different approaches in such a short call, or to enlist the expertise of people not able to make the call.

Another, more fundamental, problem, especially for an open source project, is that our short discussions leave little record for others to follow. There is a summary posted to stem-dev each week, but it reflects the brevity of the call and doesn't really form a basis that captures the issues and decisions of the project. This makes it particularly difficult for outsiders to understand the project, figure out how to contribute, and then, eventually, to join it. I note that over the past year, there have been a number of people and groups who have joined the call, only to disappear shortly thereafter. Those are just the ones we know about, we have no idea how many talented contributors looked at the project, didn't like what they saw and moved on without comment.

One of the fundamental requirements of the EDP is that the projects be "open" to anyone as well as being "transparent" in their activities. It is hard for me to argue that we have been fulfilling those obligations. Yes, the phone call is "open," but it isn't really what I would call accessible, nor does it provide for a free discussion, much of an open debate, or transparent decision making. I also note that there was a closed "committer only" call last Monday, March 28'th. In my opinion, that call violated the EDP. I did not schedule the call, but upon personal reflection, I think it was a mistake for me to sanction it by participating in it. In the future, I will not participate in such closed calls.

Eclipse is aware that open, transparent and efficient communications in open source projects is often a challenge, so they have provided the projects with newsgroups and developer mailing lists. There is some traffic on the STEM newsgroup, but little on stem-dev.

To improve our communications, and fulfill our obligations as an Eclipse project, I suggest we immediately move all of our discussions about development issues, project priorities and other related topics to stem-dev. The phone call can still be useful, but instead of having an agenda with a variety of four minute "bullet points," I suggest we select a single topic and use that time to discuss it in depth, and then have someone post a summary of the discussion on stem-dev for others to follow. Of course, we should use stem-dev to decide on each week's discussion topic. These changes should help our new committers to integrate faster into the STEM team, help us attract new talent to the project, and help us to engage more openly and more transparently with the Eclipse community as a whole.

Comments?

Dan Ford
STEM Project Lead


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