Is Habari A Functional Community?
If we refer ourselves to the definition of the word, Habari is indeed a community; we share similar interests, ideals and goals. Then why did it take a year to finally create forums? Let’s dive into Habari’s decision making strategy!
We chose to use the Apache Project Guidelines which mention that while only PMC members have binding votes, any developers may vote. Unfortunately, I believe that allowing anyone to vote has been a distraction. People, myself included, create threads and without even debating the subject, end it with a call to vote... seemingly giving participants a reason to offer little argumentation for their position. As for the more elaborate responses, the usual suspects are PMC members.
While it is awesome to see the PMC debate decisions in a public medium, we’ve been wondering how to improve the communication within the community, because let’s face it, on the 400+ subscribers of the habari-dev mailing list, around 25 people are active of which most are PMC members.
This week the PMC added forums. Boy was it a though decision to take! Last september, the reason the PMC did not take a decision on this matter was because no forums script offered mail-in replies or thread creation. How many people wanted that feature? Around 80% of the participants. Yet, no forums were created and the subject was dropped like many other discussions.
The first problem I see is objectivity. Most arguments participants offer are self-centered or have negativism tendencies. When we mentioned forums, right away we heard outcries on killing the habari-dev mailing list even if we never said we would close it. Then the comments on missing e-mail support literally blocked the forums from ever seeing the light of day. If people would think about the new users forums could potentially bring to the community...
Another problem is the over-analyzing of every decisions. Forums weren’t added last year because the PMC couldn’t settle on a script to use. Some people like to measure twice and cut once, in this case, it was measure fifteen times cut once. We’re a small community, we can afford to try several solutions before choosing.
The last “reason” I’ve been observing is the lack of initiative. Of all people, I can understand why this is happening, we’ve been exercised to ask for Owen Winkler’s opinion before doing anything. He is a great resource and very experienced programmer, from the early days of Habari, he’s been the lead because we was alone to know what’s best. With new knowledgeable contributors such as Chris Meller, Sean Coates, Goeffrey Snedders and others, people shouldn’t have to wait for Owen to stamp his seal of approval. He himself said he isn’t the guru of Habari. More contributors need to take chances even if it makes the trunk unstable. We once had the motto to “commit early, commit often”, it seems to have been a fling because most commits are final working code.
Although this article does not reflect his opinion, I'ld like to thank Christian Mohn for his help.