[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: [EDP] Mentors Council or Coaching Squad?

[Ed Merks <merks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff,

I was there and I would interpret the reaction as one of:  "Aren't we 
already doing that?" and "If we aren't already doing that well---who 
says we aren't?---shouldn't we just fix that problem rather than create 
some new group, which is likely to suffer the same problems as the 
current group?"  I strongly disagree with any summary that concludes 
that the council did not see this as a very important issue.  We spent 
more than an hour on this one topic, which I don't consider to be a 
deeply technical one but rather an organizational/project management one 
(which is not to imply it's not extremely important).  After that first 
hour,  Rich and I had to leave to give a talk, so this was effectively 
the only topic we discussed at the council.  (It's clear that meetings 
that overlap with other events will not be as well attended as they 
should be.) 

In my opinion, most of the problems we see (real and perceived) stem 
from the fact that people simply do not have enough time to do all the 
important things that need to be done.  And not to point any fingers, 
but I suspect that to a large extent the tools and the technology PMCs 
can't cope with the volume of traffic within those domains, so perhaps 
the focus should be more on such specific problems.  Also, ask yourself 
this question: how many of the people important to driving Eclipse's 
architecture are typically present at the architecture council to help 
make it effective and to make it fully an architecture council, i.e., 
with a focus on the design part of your architect definition, rather 
than mostly with a focus on the supervisory part?  I've only been to two 
meetings (the first being more effective than the second, in my 
opinion), and the next meeting is so close to EclipseCon that it's not 
really a justifiable expense to travel for it. 

In the end, high volumes of good intentions don't tend to address these 
issues since the folks with the best intentions are the most likely to 
be always too busy. There are certainly few people with better 
intentions than Bjorn.  The biggest problem I see is that once the 
council is viewed as ineffective, lack of participation will just reduce 
it's effectiveness further.  It's kind of self fulfilling.  It's for 
these reasons that a solution which proposes to create a new group to 
address the shortcomings of the current group seems destined to repeat 
the mistakes...


Jeff McAffer wrote:
> Hmmm, I added this to the wiki then found this thread so I will repeat 
> here...
>
> I was not at the meeting (unfortunately) but it is fundamentally 
> disappointing to me that the Architecture Council did not see 
> mentoring and sharing the vision of "Eclipseness" as a role they chose 
> to play. Roadmaps and processes aside, the very nature of an 
> "architect" is "One who designs and supervises the construction...". I 
> strongly believe that it is exactly the role of the Architecture 
> Council to guide projects to success through interactions such as 
> mentoring and review participation.
>
> Jeff
>
> Bjorn Freeman-Benson wrote:
> > When talking to Jeff McAffer today, he expressed surprise at this:
> >
> > >  Bjorn Freeman-Benson said:
> > >  on behalf of the Architecture Council:
> > >  At the October 2006 Architecture Council meeting in Esslingen
> > >  (http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/20061012ACMinutes.php),
> > >  the Architecture Council rejected the idea of becoming
> > >  responsible for mentoring new projects. 
> >
> > because he saw this as the perfect role for the Architecture Council 
> > - what better way to ensure the architectural coherence of Eclipse as 
> > a whole than to ensure the cooperation of the disparate projects?