Shane is founder of Punderthings℠ LLC consultancy, helping organizations find better ways to engage with the critical open source projects that power modern technology and business. He blogs and tweets about open source governance and trademark issues, and has spoken at major technology conferences like ApacheCon, OSCON, All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, and Ignite.
Shane Curcuru serves as VP Brand Management for the ASF, wrote the trademark and branding policies that cover all 200+ Apache® projects, and assists projects with defining and policing their trademarks, as well as negotiating agreements with various software vendors using Apache software brands. Shane is serving a seventh term as an elected Director of the ASF, providing governance oversight, community mentoring, and fiscal review for all Apache projects.
Otherwise, Shane is: a father and husband, a BMW driver and punny guy. Oh, and we have cats! Follow @ShaneCurcuru and read about open source communities and see my FOSS Foundation directory.
Authored Comments
Email. Both because I like it, and because it's the Apache Way.
Some people deride the ASF for being so email list bound [1], and in some cases they're right. But in most of the cases, they're missing the point.
The point of collaboration in Apache projects is to grow the community. Not just the community of the other rock stars zooming along with the latest technology, but the *whole* community. Not just people who currently have the time to be taking a project to a new level this week - but also the people who show up in a month or a year. Or, the people who don't have time to contribute every day, but only spend alternate weekends coding open source.
Even with change tracking, most SCM or etherpad or similar systems make it difficult for people who show up later to understand *how* the decisions were made. While it does take time to read through email threads, it explicitly and clearly shows new readers the process by which decisions were made and communicated, as well as the end result.
The difference might be between: is your goal to get more code done? Or is your goal to grow your community? Personally, I'm for the latter: people are far more interesting in the long run than code.
[1] I completely admit that I hate the ASF's default mail list archive software, mod_mbox, just as much as it deserves. I'd love to see us have an interface as nice as apache.markmail.org or the like, but ENOTIME. 8-)
Indeed, nice high level overview. It would be interesting to compare the governance structure to two related organizations, Apache and Eclipse.
Apache governance is strictly by merit, and is independent from direct corporate influence. Between the project independence, and the breadth of 149+ top level projects, Apache allows the maximum self-governance for projects within the overall foundation structure.
Eclipse seems to very closely mirror OpenStack: can anyone discuss the relative responsibilities of the TC and project leads at OpenStack versus how the same roles at Eclipse? On the surface it feels very similar, but I'm wondering if there's a slight shift here in terms of which positions are earned by individual merit, versus companies essentially buying seats.
Separately, while I've found the board's meeting minutes, does the TC have a homepage for meeting minutes and email lists yet? Showing as much as possible of the governance process in public thru forums or publicly archived lists is a key way to draw in new interested contributors.