Rant

Hi, Generally I am really happy with all the energy people are willing to invest on the mailinglists to talk about how to improve PEAR. I just wanted to take the time to talk about two things that came to mind through these discussions: There is alot of talk going on about PEAR Group, PEAR Core, PEAR QA team etc. The purpose of those teams are not to separate PEAR, but to organize certain tasks or responsibilities better for the Community. However that doesnt mean that non QA people should not worry about QA. It also doesnt mean that moderating between developers is the sole job of the Group. The members of the teams have build up historically. Generally if you really put your mind to it you can make it into any team. Of course each team has their own little style and their own methods of allowing people in. But no PEAR team is exclusive! So in all the discussions I would like to get away from the "QA thinks this is the way things should be" to a more "Since this topic falls under the responsibilities of the QA they came up with this solution." I am not sure if everyone immediatly sees the differences but the point is that everyone is just trying to improve PEAR as a whole. Its not about people living out their personal powertrips. They are rather taking on the responsibilities they have taken on for the betterment of the Community. Whatever these people come up with is not the "law". If you have better ideas share them with us. This brings me to another important point. This is opensource. If something is missing do something about it. We have a proposal system because Toby did something about it. We have our own bug system because Tomas did something about it. We have all sorts of packages because their repective developers created them. But remember that contrary to business, where the ability to make decisions come from your position in the hirarchy, in opensource your ability to make decisions comes from the level of trust people have for you and the amount of time you are willing to allocate. Note that just spending alot of time will not help if you havent earned the trust and having alot of trust will not help if you dont have any time to turn your ideas into a reality. However if people trust you they just might allocate the time to implement your ideas. So the point is if people dont immediatly give you all the access rights to change something it just might be that you havent earned their trust. In that case its probably not them generally being dicks, but that they have invested time into something and want to make sure that some new guy screws things up. In that case I recommend that you try to earn the trust of the relevant people. This might include compromising a bit and maybe after a while when you have earned the necessary trust the same people might in the end agree to all your new ideas (as "wacky" as they might have seem to them initially). If for some reason or another no agreement can be found then the Group is here to help mediate between the parties. Anyways to summarize: - while we may delegate task to certain subgroups we are all members of greater project: PEAR - your ability to affect PEAR's future is above and beyond proportional to the level of trust you have inside the community and your ability to actually implement your ideas I hope my rant will actually help people a bit to get the focus again on being productive instead of feeling like they have to battle people inside the community. Generally it seems however that by and large PEAR will indeed benefit from all the recent discussions and that we have found ways to conduct our discussions with the necessary respect. regards, Lukas Smith smith@backendmedia.com _______________________________ BackendMedia www.backendmedia.com berlin@backendmedia.com Linn Zwoch Smith GbR Pariser Str. 44 D-10707 Berlin Tel +49 30 83 22 50 00 Fax +49 30 83 22 50 07