Architecture Council/Minutes October 9 2008

Meeting Title:	Architecture Council Monthly Meeting
Date & Time:	Thursday October 9, 2008 at 1500 UTC / 0800 SFO / 1100 Ottawa / 1600 London / 1700 Berlin HTML | iCal
Dial-in:	(+1) 613.287.8000 (Ottawa and international) or 866.362.7064 (toll-free North America) passcode 464440#

Attendees

• Sign up here (alphabetical by last name), since it's hard to catch all names during the call.
• Signed-up: Chris Aniszczyk, Wayne "Mad Dog" Beaton, Boris Bokowski, David Carver, Eugene Chan, Brian Fitzpatrick, John Graham, Neil Hauge, Oisin Hurley, Mik Kersten, Ed Merks, Martin Oberhuber, Andrew Overholt, Doug Schaefer, Michael Scharf, Georg Schmidt, Darin Swanson, Gunnar Wagenknecht, Thomas Watson, Mike Wilson, Darin Wright, Gary Xue
• Tentative: Timothy deBoer, John Duimovich, John Wiegand
• Regrets: John Arthorne, Doug Clarke, Oliver Cole, Adrian Colyer, Doug Gaff, Jochen Krause, Tom Schindl, Karsten Schmidt
• No-Show: Naci Dai, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Richard Gronback, Thomas Hallgren, Markus Knauer, Wenfeng Li, Jeff McAffer, Mike Milinkovich, Philippe Mulet, Steve Northover, Brett Porter, Mary Ruddy, Mark Vandenbrink, David Williams

Agenda / Notes

• Feel free to edit, but not during the call!

Review of Action Items

• Last meeting Architecture Council/Minutes September 11 2008#Action Items
• (until next mtg) Mik to create initial "architectural walkthrough" material for mylyn. One more to follow before publicly announcing?
  • 1 wiki page, some design decisions,
  • prepare until nov 13, maybe discuss later
• (still committed) MichaelS to draft an E-Mail about the "plugin granularity" idea, searching for people to lead the effort
• (still committed) Michael to flesh out the Patterns idea and remind the EAC
• Martin to send out E-Mail about the EAC Bug component
• ongoing Wayne to list mentor-less technology projects on the Architecture Council/Members and Mentors page
• All PMC's to list mentor-less projects in their domain on the Architecture Council/Members and Mentors#Projects that need mentors page
  • Done Status per PMC (List of Projects): BIRT , DSDP , DTP , Eclipse not yet, Modeling not yet, RT not yet, STP , Technology ongoing, Tools , TPTP no incubating projects, WTP found ATF
  • Martin thinks that only incubating projects need mentors
  • Wayne thinks that on Technology, every project should have at least one mentor - AI Wayne create a bug to add Mentor in the Portal
  • Wayne: As a fairly recent change, mentors must be on the AC
  • Technology: Subversive? / STP: SCA Tools? / Tools: Hibachi moved from DougG to DougS? / WTP: ATF?
  • Wayne: Burden is with the Projects to make themselves interesting, and attract a mentor
    • Mentors have some responsibility -- AI Martin start a Wiki page explaining what's good about having a mentor
    • Should existing projects have mentors too? -- Defer to next meeting, let's do incubating projects
• (40% done) Everyone to hyperlink to their Bio on the Architecture Council/Members and Mentors page
• Martin to add call-in details to Google Calendar Reminders
• Everyone to edit the Architecture Council/Top Ten Recommendations page
• Everyone to hyperlink on the new Architecture Council/Links Collection to interesting architecture-related blogs, articles or other resources
  • Boris likes the page, we should add more

Administrative

• New Members: Tom Schindl (appointed), David Carver (appointed), Karsten Schmidt (Strategic Consumer Rep)
• Missing Affiliations on the Councils Page - Please contact Anne Jacko <mailto:emo@eclpise.org>:
  • David Carver - STAR
  • Adrian Colyer - SpringSource
  • Ed Merks - MacroModeling
  • Tom Schindl - BestSolution.at
  • Karsten Schmidt -
  • Gunnar Wagenknecht -
• Potential new member: Has anybody worked with David Orme so far?
  • Ed think that he would be a very great addition, very insightful on architecture, very idealistic; Boris agrees, though not been very active at Eclipse recently; DougS -- he comes to all the parties; Ed: would he come to the meetings? AI Martin contact him
• Dormant proposal fleshed out:
  • Being dormant means not being waited for in case of elections, and not being invited to meetings
  • New members don't know what "being active" means... mentoring new AC members? Guiding them on how to get active? How does the AC work? - AI Georg write down E-mail: AC from perspective of a new member
  • Otherwise, proposal is accepted
• Attendance Tracking: Want to change meeting invitations to personal ones via Google Calendar instead of the Mailing List - will hopefully also help to track meeting attendance
  • Anybody have a problem with their E-mail stored at Google?
  • Want minimum effort for everyone to track attendance... Web Poll won't work, E-Mail is so-so
  • Boris: AC calendar merged into personal calendar; added personal reminder; Google Spreadsheet?
    • Georg against using Google too much
    • AI Martin start a thread on ML to find a better solution

How the AC Works

• Been disappointed by lack of participation in recent initiatives (action items).
• With such a large group, just sitting at the phone meeting is not what counts. The monthly phone meeting is mostly a reminder for action items, inspiration for new things through live discussion, aggregation of information, and a fast resolve issues of disagreement.
  • All other work needs to be offline. Use this as an encouragement for people to still participate even if they can't join the phone call.
  • What really counts is involvement in E-Mail / Bugzilla discussions, engagement in the action items, and pro-active finding, articulating and tracking potential improvements to Eclipse as a Whole.

News from the EMO & Councils

• (was: News from the Board)
• How to officially communicate Requirements and especially their changes (deltas) (as per the board, dev process, IP policy...) to the PMCs, Project Leads, Committers?
  • Who does still not know about the requirement to track 3rd party lib dependencies by a CQ? (Last one in The IP Process in 8 cartoons)?
  • Options: Watch the Wiki, read Bjorn's blog, read the dev process RSS feed, eclipse.org-committers-announce, eclipse.org-project-leads, other?
    • Wayne: Wiki, website / projects, mentors ... bjorn's blog ... newsgroups, mailing lists
    • Ed: Mentioned on Board Level, that process changes need to be notified properly (committer mailing list?)
    • Michael: Information flow is a general problem
    • Wayne: Biggest problem is not knowing what needs to be done... how to find information about something you don't know
    • Ed: Webinar, EclipseCon... "Stuff that all committers should know" (Doug Gaff's EclipseCon 2008 presentation "how do I lead my project" was very well attended and received)
    • Michael: "Eclipse Driver's License" ... questions that you need to answer ... idea of certifying and re-certifying committers pushed back ... Michael: Test as a voluntary method
    • Martin: Who's managing the PMC's?
    • Ed: IBM would have a Business Conduct with Questions
    • AI Martin file a bug for discussion
• RC - Roadmap Process: RequirementsCouncilThemesAndPriorities
  • Does the RC even exist at this point?
  • Are we going to feed back the themes from the project plans into the T&P, or try to find some mapping?
  • What is Bjorn's Roadmap Generation Tool going to do?
• Wayne: eclipse.org-evangelists mailing list, current speaking opportunities
  • Community Development for Eclipse Projects page
• PC - Richard Gronback: New Galileo Requirements from the Planning Council?
  • Must do: Use only Published API by M6
  • Must do: Provide basic Capability / Activity Definitions by M6
  • Must do: Use Babel by M6
• Don: StAC meeting at Eclipse World?

Recent EAC bugs

• How to facilitate discussions among committers?
  • Proposal: Create a new eclipse.org-committers-announce mailing list for official announcements. Allow discussions on current committers list.
  • AI Martin ask the webmaster / EMO to create the list
• Request for a mentor for COSMOS
• bug 249371 The new Eclipse.org homepage
• bug 249959 Copyright Header in checked-in generated artifacts
• bug 249745 Repository Best Practices (Subversive vs Subclipse)
• bug 246840 Jobs and ISchedulingRules - discussion concluded - what is CCRC?
• bug 246945 Interfacing with Libs that are not EPL Compatible (mostly LGPL)

Action Items

• (until next mtg) Mik to create initial "architectural walkthrough" material for mylyn. One more to follow before publicly announcing?
• (old) Michael to draft an E-Mail about the "plugin granularity" idea, searching for people to lead the effort
• (old) Michael to flesh out the Patterns idea and remind the EAC
• (old) Everyone to hyperlink to their Bio on the Architecture Council/Members and Mentors page
• (old) Everyone to hyperlink on the new Architecture Council/Links Collection to interesting architecture-related blogs, articles or other resources
• (old) All PMC's to list mentor-less projects in their domain on the Architecture Council/Members and Mentors#Projects that need mentors page: Wayne for Technology, McQ for Eclipse, Ed for Modeling, Tom for RT; WTP to add ATF to the page
• Wayne to file bug for portal to add fields for project mentors
• Ed, Gunnar, Karsten to E-Mail their affiliation to Anne Jacko <emo@eclipse.org>
• Georg bug 250348 to send an E-mail to the AC list with questions / things unclear for him as a new AC member
• Martin to start a Wiki page explaining what's good about having a mentor
• Martin to contact David Orme
• Martin bug 250320 ask webmaster to create eclipse.org-committers-announce mailing list
• Martin bug 250315 asking for better attendance tracking at AC meetings
• Martin bug 250317 for discussing ways of spreading EMO information

Next Meeting

• Architecture Council call on Thursday, November 13