Role of the PEAR Group

Hi all, I'm glad to see such a spiked interest in the last few days for the run to the PEAR Group. I see some great names and even some people with contradictory opinions which I think is what the group will internally need this year. Anyways I'm glad to see you running and I think it'll be a great challenging run! Now onto the roles of the PEAR Group: As stated by Stig a few years ago[1], the role of the group is not to add bureaucracy but to make sure that the elected body (The GROUP) takes the community input and makes effective, productive use of it by creating and updating existing rules/standards/decisions. With the upcoming stable release of 5.3 and some movement picking up on PHP 6 again but also with Pyrus coming along nicely (Thanks to Greg, Brett and everyone involved!) the group will be more important than ever on making sure that the community and our standards are synchronized and effective with new things as such as closures, namespaces, package structure, etc. That is the GROUP's job to discuss and make effective use of their knowledge and community involvements to make choices that will reflect the people's needs and lead them towards better packages/development, etc. Another very important thing is that with PEAR2, in the past years there has been discussions of "mentorship" programs and collectives of packages. This is something that has to be lead very well in the next year as the mentorship program will help bringing new developers, retain them and help them build better more effective packages but also help them through personal achievements and development. Over the course of the past 2 years, the group has nailed issues as such as plagiarism policies, PEAR2 community development, adjusted and more realistic RFC Proposing system/logistics and new coding standards. Within the next year I'd love to see more movement on the coding standards front but foremost on PEAR2 development (website, PEPr, collectives, mentorship/retention of new developers, flexibility). But keep in mind that the last statement is something I would like to see as last year's president and hopefully this year's as well. For my part or for the president's part, the job is mostly public relations and making sure PEAR keeps a good image. There are good things in the works like chatting with php|architect for a possible "Pimp my PEAR" corner (Not the PEAR corner as Helgi has been doing -- but more something that will relate the community to packages and what the packages can do for enterprises and real life scenarios.) This is still uncertain and ongoing discussions are going but thought it may be good to let you know. In the past year I have been going accross Europe to "non-PHP" conferences mostly and trying to see what people's problems are with PHP and PEAR in general and explaining to them what the new changes are bringing. Making sure people see the change and get over the myths that have been haunting PEAR for a few years (Believe it or not last week only I have someone who complained to me that PEAR was still PHP4 only...). Hope this clears some questions and that it gives you some interest in the PEAR Group :) -- Slan, David