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

[Bjorn Freeman-Benson <bjorn.freeman-benson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ed Merks wrote:
> 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?"  

An excellent point. My claim is that the new group will be composed of 
people who are interested in, and have the time to, do the job of 
one-to-one project mentoring (answering questions, discussing problems, 
explaining how they solved the same problem, etc) rather than a group of 
people with a vaguely defined architecture mission.

It is entirely possible that the new mission will also be ineffective or 
that the new, larger, more diverse, group of people will also be 
ineffective. I prefer to remain optimistic that the mentoring role will 
advance Eclipse's goals better than the architecture role has.

> 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.  

Another good point. However there are many new projects that are 
starting outside the Tools and Technology projects, all of whom could 
use mentoring. In fact, one might even argue that starting projects in 
other top-level projects is detrimental to the long-term success of 
Eclipse because all of the mentoring of those new projects comes from 
the "group-think" of that one PMC - wouldn't it better to have at least 
two different views of Eclipse, perhaps three different views of 
Eclipse, to guide the 'open source social development' of a new project?

> 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?  

A third good point. Are the architecture council members really the 
right people to attend from each project? I cannot answer that - the 
projects will have to answer for themselves.

> I've only been to two 
> meetings (the first being more effective than the second, in my 
> opinion), 

Ed, could you explain how the June 28th meeting was effective?
http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/20060628ACMinutes.php

As I recall, we talked about the JVM 1.4/1.5 issue and concluded that 
everyone should just do what they should already be doing: making sure 
their run-time dependency is explicit. There was also an action item for 
 various members to write up a wiki page and update their plans: 
neither of which happened (or at least I don't recall them being 
announced on the mailing list, a wiki search reveals nothing
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Special:Search?search=JVM&go=Go
and a random sampling of project plans has some JVM information:
NO> http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/ > "Release Plan 2.0"
NO> http://www.eclipse.org/datatools/ > "Development" > "DTP 1.0 Project 
Plan"
YES> http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/project/project_plan_R2_2_0.php
NO> http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/GMF_Project_Plan

We also talked about a common build infrastructure. There was a lack of 
follow through from the AC members on their lists of problems and 
prides. In spite of that, the Foundation held a releng workshop in the 
fall and a common build structure is slowly evolving from that.

Maybe I'm being too demanding, but I don't see a lack of follow through 
by the AC members as a sign of effectiveness.

- Bjorn