Council Members,
Here is the "final^2 revision" of the agenda, etc.
The Requirements, Architecture, and Planning Councils will be
meeting in Boston August 23, 24, and 25. We will be meeting at the
Hotel Marlow. You will have needed to make your own reservations - I
hope you have already done so.
Hotel Marlowe
25 Edwin H. Land Boulevard
Cambridge, MA 02141
617.868.8000
The schedule has an overlap between the Requirements and
Planning Councils and the four people on both councils will have to
choose which meeting to attend. It does, however, solve other schedule
problems for other members, so we'll give it a try. Obviously we're
still trying to find the perfect Council meeting schedule, so we'll try
this and see if it is better or worse than our previous
Requirements-Architecture overlap.
- Tuesday all day - Requirements Council
- Tuesday all day - Planning Council
- Wednesday morning - plenary with all three councils
- Wednesday afternoon - Architecture Council 1/2
- Thursday morning - Architecture Council 2/2
There will not be call-in numbers for these face-to-face meetings
Requirements Council
Tuesday, August 24, 8:30am - 5pm
- Quality. Continuing our quality discussion starting with a
discussion of the
draft Guidelines and the feedback received from the community about
these Guidelines. Please note that this documentation also addresses
the action item from the last meeting "ACTION: Bjorn and Mike are to
define the exit criteria for a checkpoint review."
- Roadmap. The days are growing shorter and autumn will
be upon us in no time at all, and with autumn comes the Eclipse Roadmap
process. Last
year's Roadmap is available online.
- Mike would like all representatives of Strategic Members to
come prepared with their input into the Roadmap process. Last year,
each person prepared a brief document and/or presentation on their
firm's key requirements and presented them to the RC to help kick-start
the process.
- Roadmap debrief: What worked last year, what changes would
be like to see to the process?
- Requirements Tracking. From the minutes of our last
meeting: "Bjorn is to propose a requirements tracking process for
Requirements Council. How will the data be tracked and reported?"
Bjorn's Tracking Proposal
There are three issues:
- enumerating the larger architectural requirements
- encouraging the projects to implement those requirements
- tracking and reporting on the progress of implementations
For item (1), I propose that we add these requirements to the
Roadmap
document. Specifically, the larger architectural requirements from the
Strategic
members (Strategic Consumers and Strategic Developers) should be
enumerated in
the Themes and Priorities section. Where possible, these larger issues
should
references specific bugs, however we need to acknowledge the "cannot
see
the forest for the trees" problem with trying to describe larger
architectural issues using only point-detailed bug reports. The Themes
and
Priorities section helps drive the project planning for the next major
releases
of all the projects, thus including specific architectural constraints
will help
steer the projects.
For example, SAP has described the "Make Eclipse Ready for Model
Driven Development" requirement at previous Council meetings.
For item (2), I propose that the Strategic members use the Council
plenary
sessions to have a dialog with the relevant projects and then to follow
up with
one or more team-to-team meetings between the projects. Eclipse
projects are run
on open source principles, one of which is that direction follows
contribution.
Historically, requirements placed on Eclipse projects without
corresponding
development resources are ineffective. The collective buy-in around the
Themes
and Priorities, combined with direct interaction between Strategic
members and
the project leaders should help adoption.
For item (3), I propose a live
Roadmap Addendum - a summary of the progress made towards
implementing the
larger architectural requirements. The Roadmap itself is static, but
the summary
will be automatically generated from the projects' status information.
The
Strategic members with the larger architectural requirements (and the
EMO) can use
the summary to watch the promised and actual progress towards
implementing the
issue. The summary will be available on the eclipse.org website and via
a
syndication feed.
Tuesday, August 24, evening
A group dinner will be held in the Hotel Marlowe in the Alexis
Gallery. Due to these special circumstances, the Eclipse Foundation
will assume the cost of the meal for the group this time. There will
be a Cash Bar available from 6:30 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. Please email Sharon with your menu
choice no later than NOON, Thursday, August 18th.
- Grilled Filet Mignon with red wine demi-glace (please specify
rare, medium, well)
- Seared Atlantic Halibut with lemon shallot beurre blanc
- Vegetarian
Wednesday, August 25, 8:30am - noon
Plenary session with all three councils. The purpose of this session
is for the Strategic Consumers and the Requirements Council as a while
to provide input directly to the Architecture and Planning Councils.
A working lunch will be provided.
- 8:30 HP presentation of Strategic Consumer requirements, issues,
and proposed Roadmap additions.
- 9:00 MontaVista presentation of Strategic Consumer requirements,
issues, ...
- 9:30 SAP presentation of Strategic Consumer requirements, issues,
...
- 10:00 Serena presenation of Strategic Consumer requirements,
issues, ...
- 10:30 IBM presentation of ICU4J proposal (see attached document).
As you read the document, be aware that the proposal is for Eclipse
projects to use the ICU4J library as a third-party library, much like
various Apache libraries are currently used. This is not a proposal for
a new Eclipse ICU4J project.
- 11:30 General discussion to include development process
guidelines and upcoming Roadmap
Architecture Council
Tuesday, August 24, evening
A group dinner will be held in the Hotel Marlowe in the Alexis
Gallery. Due to these special circumstances, the Eclipse Foundation
will assume the cost of the meal for the group this time. There will
be a Cash Bar available from 6:30 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. Please email Sharon with your menu
choice no later than NOON, Thursday, August 18th.
- Grilled Filet Mignon with red wine demi-glace (please specify
rare, medium, well)
- Seared Atlantic Halibut with lemon shallot beurre blanc
- Vegetarian
Wednesday, August 25, 8:30am - noon
Plenary session with all three councils. The purpose of this session
is for the Strategic Consumers and the Requirements Council as a while
to provide input directly to the Architecture and Planning Councils.
A working lunch will be provided.
- 8:30 HP presentation of Strategic Consumer requirements, issues,
and proposed Roadmap additions.
- 9:00 MontaVista presentation of Strategic Consumer requirements,
issues, ...
- 9:30 SAP presentation of Strategic Consumer requirements, issues,
...
- 10:00 Serena presenation of Strategic Consumer requirements,
issues, ...
- 10:30 IBM presentation of ICU4J proposal (see attached document).
As you read the document, be aware that the proposal is for Eclipse
projects to use the ICU4J library as a third-party library, much like
various Apache libraries are currently used. This is not a proposal for
a new Eclipse ICU4J project.
- 11:30 General discussion to include development process
guidelines and upcoming Roadmap
Wednesday, August 25, noon - 5pm
The first half of the Architecture Council meeting.
Thursday, August 26, 8:30am - noon
The second half of the Architecture Council meeting.
- Project Boundaries and Council Role in Coordination. How
can the Architecture Council help the technical progress of Eclipse
without creating an overly large bureaucracy? We're an open source
organization, so in some circles that means "no control", but in fact
we're an organization with a deliberate process whose purpose is to
create high-quality frameworks. How does the Architecture Council help
with that?
- Monthly Conference Calls. How can we use these calls
effectively? What issues are useful for discussion? What is a good
schedule? What issues should we expect the Projects to bring the
Architecture Council? We have not had monthly conference calls and I
have not received any demands for them, but there is a vague sense that
if we had more coordination between projects, that would be good.
- Quality. Continuing our quality discussion starting with
a discussion of
the draft Guidelines and the feedback received from the community
about these Guidelines.
- Roadmap. The days are growing shorter and autumn will
be upon us in no time at all, and with autumn comes the Eclipse Roadmap
process. The
Roadmap version 1 had a fairly lame architecture summary of Eclipse
- we'd like to do better in Roadmap version 2. What would we like to
see? And how can we make that happen?
- Public Leadership. I'm going to push the idea that project
leads (especially technical leads) should be blogging about their
projects and their projects' relationship to other things going on in
the ecosystem. Eclipse has gained significant traction in the mindshare
of "use Eclipse as a Java IDE" and a bit of traction in the "use
Eclipse as a tooling platform", but we haven't gained much mindshare in
the "open source project" area. Blogging is one way to help change that.
Planning Council
Tuesday, August 24, 8:30am - 5pm
A working lunch will be provided.
- Synchronized Release Train. Kevin Haaland will describe
the mechanics of what projects who are opting-in to the Release Train
will be opting-in to. The projects will, at this meeting, opt-in or
opt-out.
- Tyler points out that while that at our previous meeting we
agreed that the projects would opt-in or out at this meeting, it may
not be possible given that this will be the first time the projects
have seen the requirements for doing so.
- Status Reporting Format. Please read
the proposed XML status reporting file format. We will discuss and
then agree to something like it, and we will agree to a time line for
placing our projects' information in this file format.
- Roadmap. The days are growing shorter and autumn will be
upon us in no time at all, and with autumn comes the Eclipse Roadmap
process. The
Roadmap version 1 was a real effort to put together. My theory is
that the XML status report format will auto-gen the Planning Council
parts of the Roadmap, but we should make sure we believe that before we
leave Boston.
- Clean Up Old Websites. A check on whether we
accomplished our website updates that we
agreed to last meeting; either update old information or remove it.
I sent a reminder email on July 9th with some specific out-of-date and
incomplete items that I had found on various project websites. Checking
those items again on August 6th, I find that only one of them has been
fixed. Hence I'm going to assume that we (collectively) did not spend
much/any time meeting our commitment to update the project website
contents by the date that we (collectively) had agreed to.
- Standard Website Content. The Committer Get-Together in
Beaverton last week resulted in a suggestion that all project websites
have four standard links with standard icons and standard locations.
This way anybody can find out common information about a project by
going to its website and following one of those links. We should decide
what those four (or two or three or five) links are, and we should all
agree to put them on our sites. Suggestions include: the current plan,
the PMC/project leadership minutes, project phase, ... ?
- Bjorn would like to see the four standard urls be part of the
Status Reporting Format XML file, and then have a simple standard php
script that generates the four standard links on the project home page.
- Quality. Continuing our quality discussion starting with
a discussion of
the draft Guidelines and the feedback received from the community
about these Guidelines.
- Project Log. As part quality discussion and part of the
Guidelines and part of the IP Policy that we all signed on to follow,
each project should be keeping a
Project Log. We will go over what needs to be in that log and how
important it is and the time line that the Foundation needs the current
copies of the Log.
- Changes to Bugzilla. Discussion of bug#106263.
Wenfeng (BIRT) has requested some additional Bugzilla features to help
the BIRT project management. Because we all use Bugzilla, we should
discuss the pros and cons of making changes, how we might make changes
that are project-agnostic, and whether we want to accept the
bugzilla-upgrade risks of making changes.
Tuesday, August 24, evening
A group dinner will be held in the Hotel Marlowe in the Alexis
Gallery. Due to these special circumstances, the Eclipse Foundation
will assume the cost of the meal for the group this time. There will
be a Cash Bar available from 6:30 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. Please email Sharon with your menu
choice no later than NOON, Thursday, August 18th.
- Grilled Filet Mignon with red wine demi-glace (please specify
rare, medium, well)
- Seared Atlantic Halibut with lemon shallot beurre blanc
- Vegetarian
Wednesday, August 25, 8:30am - noon
Plenary session with all three councils. The purpose of this session
is for the Strategic Consumers and the Requirements Council as a while
to provide input directly to the Architecture and Planning Councils.
A working lunch will be provided.
- 8:30 HP presentation of Strategic Consumer requirements, issues,
and proposed Roadmap additions.
- 9:00 MontaVista presentation of Strategic Consumer requirements,
issues, ...
- 9:30 SAP presentation of Strategic Consumer requirements, issues,
...
- 10:00 Serena presenation of Strategic Consumer requirements,
issues, ...
- 10:30 IBM presentation of ICU4J proposal (see attached document).
As you read the document, be aware that the proposal is for Eclipse
projects to use the ICU4J library as a third-party library, much like
various Apache libraries are currently used. This is not a proposal for
a new Eclipse ICU4J project.
- 11:30 General discussion to include development process
guidelines and upcoming Roadmap
I repeat what I said last quarter: "Eclipse is at yet another
interesting point in its evolution: success has bred rapid growth. It
is our challenge to manage this growth while maintaining the
productivity, innovative frameworks, and high quality bar that have
made Eclipse great."
We're making progress, but we need to keep making progress.
--
