[Jakarta Wiki] Update of "JakartaBoardReport-February2007" byMartinvandenBemt

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The following page has been changed by MartinvandenBemt:
http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/JakartaBoardReport-February20 07

The comment on the change is:
Personal notes and some additions

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=== Status ===

- Chair to summarize Jakarta-wide news + the current state of affairs.
+ This board report was mainly constructed by other people than me, which is a big improvement (thanks everyone). I also moved the board report to a fixed location on the wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/JakartaBoardReport-current), so it's easier to locate for people.
+ The code grant for the not yet commons SSL (formerly named commons-ssl), has been completed, so we can progress to having a vote where SSL should end up on general and based on that result take the correct incubator path (legal / full incubation).
+
+ What is not completely clear for me at this point, is the board report schedule. An extra report was requested (lack of commons projects in the report). Reporting next month again will be a lot of work, since my goal is to report on every subproject (even if there is no or hardly any activity).
+
+ Inactive projects
+
+ Disclaimer : we have lot's of active projects !
+
+ Definition list :
+
+ Inactive project = a project that has no *developer* community.
+
+ The Apache Way :
+
+ To become committer on a project you have to earn that right, you have to stand out, submit patches, show you care, learn the apache way and have to get noticed by the current committers who can nominate such a person.
+
+ Problem :
+
+ If that didn't happen enough in the past, it can happen that at a certain point no developer community is active anymore.
+
+ Which causes :
+
+ A catch22 situation. Since there is no developer community, no one is able to determine if people deserve to become a committer. Even if you are monitoring such a list (such as I do for all Jakarta lists), it is hard to determine if people deserve committership.
+
+ Solution :
+
+ The only thing we know for sure : inactive projects needs someone to mentor the project to become active again. This goes for all possible scenario's :
+
+ 1. Actively support forks and when they show they are capable to work on the project, get the code back (needs mentoring, grants, etc)
+ 2. More liberal in getting committers on board
+ 3. Actively following the user / dev lists and issue trackers to see if there is someone ready for committer ship. (is the normal way, although the focus here is not if patches etc are technically correct)
+
+ I like to prevent Jakarta becoming some kind of collection with inactive project, so the first goal is preventing that this scenario occurs on our current subprojects where possible. So I would like to ask the current active developers to invest a little bit more time in looking what others are doing.
+
+ I think this discussion is also useful to have on the incubator list.

=== Releases ===

@@ -241, +276 @@

MvdB :

Added Mark Thomas to the POI Committer list. Actively working on a release, which is planned for the beginning of March. After that release next steps will be taken in a move to TLP.
+ All headers, notices are up-to-date and the build process have been updated to accomodate a correct release.

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