Python Secret Weblog for 2009 March 18 (entry 0)

(22) Wed Mar 18 2009 04:16 The Perils of Volunteering:

I'm on the board of the Zope Foundation. In fact, until thursday this week, when hopefully the new board gets seated, I'm its chairman.

The old bylaws of the Zope Foundation sucked. We were burdened with them from the start; we inherited them as the board from the startup phase. We tried to work with them but they didn't work, and then we decided to go with new bylaws.

So we painstakingly work on them. We finally had a big meeting in december trying to get all our members there so we can vote for the new bylaws and have it pass. It did pass, and we were happy.

So the Zope Foundation has new bylaws. But we have membership under the old bylaws. Our membership roster is old and stuffy, and it won't work as our bylaws changed and membership categories are different. The bylaws old or new don't provide for a membership transition. We're in a limbo. How do we get from old to new?

A few hard-working volunteers, Zope Foundation board members, try to figure this out. We've been working on this frustrating bylaws stuff for about the entire existence of the Foundation by now.

Now we all want to get this over with and make way for a new board. We had already discovered that to do such a transition we need to make reasonably bold steps (like replacing the bylaws!), otherwise nothing much will happen.

We decide to mail everybody that is an existing member and ask them what membership status they have, and if they don't answer, we'll assume they don't want to be a member.

Something's weird. We noticed that some supposed members didn't receive the email. It turns out we missed out on members who were member only through their employer's membership under the previous structure. So we contact those.

That, we thought, was it, doublechecking we did everything all right. But we hadn't. Mea Culpa as the chairman of the board. I should've made sure we had made a second try to contact people. I think I got distracted by the other issue, and thought it was done.

We announce the foundation elections to our membership as it is then, after the cleanup. We neglect to announce it in public. Of course we don't have this obligation, but we should have anyway to just keep interested bystanders informed.

People point out they don't hear much from the Zope Foundation. Alexander Limi did today just before we had a board meeting. We do have a website and such that people can read, but it's not working in getting to people. I, slightly overburdened volunteer, grumble, but point taken.

The new board should definitely improve this, so I put it on the list of todo items for the new board. Even the old board will. So when we announce the election result, we make sure we did announce that to zope-announce, today.

Lennart Regebro doesn't always read the email the Foundation sends to him directly about his membership status, but he does read zope-announce.

So Lennart gets upset as he hadn't been aware of any election! He contacts us. Me in particular. He tells me he wants us to redo the election. Oh joy... Deep sigh.

So today I have a headache from all this. I was spending quite a few hours trying to help the Zope community organize itself, not getting paid for it, and I got an angry Lennart as a result.

I want to think about something else. I try to relax. Then accidentally read the blogs as feeds are so very nicely integrated in my web browser these days. So what do I see? Lennart analyzing all our mistakes, my mistakes, in public in great detail in a blog entry.

It's an excellent way to discourage volunteers who have been genuinely trying to do their best. I know, it wasn't Lennart's intent to discourage us. Not sure what the intent of that blog posting was. Maybe it was to get us to say sorry. Sorry, Lennart.

I feel discouraged. I want to chuck the whole Foundation, and what the heck, chuck the whole Zope thing to boot. That's just me throwing a hissy fit, though, and I should be better after some sleep. I will probably be able to joke and laugh about this soon. But that's not how I feel right now.

---

Comments:

Posted by Tony at Wed Mar 18 2009 09:32

Martijn,
Myabe it _is_ time to leave Zope behind? I've been using and deploying Zope with great success since '98, but stopped in 2006 as the whole Zope 3 thing was just too confusing to me, and since then have been getting more and more into Django. It works, it's clean, it's vibrant.

There's an awful lot of energy in the 'newer' python frameworks - perhaps that would help?

Tone

Posted by Tony at Wed Mar 18 2009 09:33

Drat - didn't want email address shown - can you delete please?

Posted by Tim Parkin at Wed Mar 18 2009 11:08

You have to find it slightly amusing that hi blog entry ends with "What Django could learn from Zope". Anyway - you have my sympathies.

Posted by Lennart Regebro at Wed Mar 18 2009 11:15

Well, thanks for making me feel appreciated. ;-)

Explaining feeling is not best done over the internet. I can explain why I got angry when we meet at PyCon.

Thanks for saying "all our mistakes". Yesterday your position sounded like the mistake was mine. But it isn't. And neither is it yours, ans in you the person. It's the boards mistake. These types of mistakes are never done by one person, you need a committee.

Posted by Rob Wilco at Wed Mar 18 2009 11:52

You have my support. Thanks for your hard work.

[ ... ]

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

-- Rudyard Kipling

Posted by Encolpe Degoute at Wed Mar 18 2009 12:33

Hello Martjin,

The Lennart's blog entry is both a good and awkward initiative.

It is a good because he shows that the Zope Fundation can fix internal issue with mind and diplomacy even if the bylaws are not respected.
It was an awkward post because you are named in this post. I see more a human errors suite than a personal error.

The Plone Fundation also have a 'purge' policy to remove 'no more active' members once a years. As is it a partially automated workflow a human error or an implementation error is always possible. The more important is that all incoming problems can be fixed by discussing between members.

Volunteering is often something ungrateful and it difficult to stay active a long time in the same group. I'm reading the Karl Fogel's book about 'Producing open source software' and it explain clearly how this issue comes times to times in a project life.

Please, stay involved.

Posted by Paul Boddie at Wed Mar 18 2009 13:55

Hello Martijn,

Yes, welcome to volunteer country: spend a load of your free time trying to set stuff up and then have a bunch of people complaining because there are creases in the red carpet.

Posted by Martijn Faassen at Wed Mar 18 2009 14:01

Tony, email address removed as you requested. And thanks for an amusing example of Django advocacy! I hope you're not an example of Django's advocacy in general because man, that was a seriously inappropriate conversion attempt!

Thanks for the poem; I do like poetry. Thanks for the support.

I said at the bottom, I felt very discouraged, but today is a new day.

Lennart, I'd be nice if you could say something like: "sorry, it was of course a mistake not to read the email the Foundation sent to me, but it didn't warn me as to its urgency and I didn't", instead of continuing to ignore that.

Posted by Jens Vagelpohl at Wed Mar 18 2009 14:33

@Paul Boddie: Very well put.

As another member of the board that apparently made nothing but mistakes that's how I felt. My motivation after spending lots of my spare time on ZF work last year has evaporated in a single day. Amazing.

Posted by Steve Holden at Wed Mar 18 2009 16:06

Ironically the Python Software Foundation has recently proposed fairly radical changes to the bylaws used as a model by the Zope Foundation, and will be voting on acceptance at the upcoming members' meeting at PyCon. Let's hope we haven't painted ourselves into a corner there.

I'm glad you have managed to retain your perspective on this. Paul Boddie has it about right: many people are happy to ignore emails and other attempts at communication as long as nothing they dislike happens. Then you find out from a blog post. I have to say Lennart's reason for ignoring the email entitled "Zope Foundation Memership Changes" sound somewhat specious, and doesn't encourage the belief that he took membership of the Foundation seriously.

I'd say the important thing was finding a way to reinstate Lennart's membership, and since that's happened the rest is a storm in a teacup. Let's talk about this at PyCon over a few beers. Sorry you aren't running for the PSF board. Maybe next year?

Posted by Lennart Regebro at Wed Mar 18 2009 16:24

Martijn, I did a mistake, and I'm sorry about that.

I also said so, but admittedly that was wrapped in a list of mistakes the foundation made, and therefore not particularily evident. Sorry about that.

And yes, as pointed out by many, volunteer work is fundamentally unappreciated. I know that and should have thought about that when posting. That would probably have made me have a larger disclaimer in the beginning.

Posted by Lennart Regebro at Wed Mar 18 2009 16:41

Jens, I'm sorry to make you feel that you make nothing but mistakes. This is obviously incorrect. My post only points out the mistakes, not the non-mistakes, and is therefore naturally overly negative. Also, most of the good work the foundation makes is completely invisible to the surrounding word. Also remember that the work in organising the election and meeting was completely lost on me, as I was removed from the mailinglist before this happened, so I had no chance to notice this.

Steve, you are right that I'm happy to ignore the foundation and emails until something negative happens. This is the nature of people, and that's why it's important to clearly communicate that something potentially negative is in the works. This did not happen. And since I know and trust the people on the board, I assumed it was in good hands, and that they wouldn't make something completely strange.

My membership has already been reinstated, btw.

Posted by Alexander Limi at Wed Mar 18 2009 19:11

What you're doing to reboot the Zope Foundation is awesome, and these things are fundamentally hard, especially for the loose types of organization that spring up around open source projects.

I'm sure we could work more closely together in some way to make it better — for what it's worth, the Plone Foundation board kicks ass, and as far as foundations go, it's a very functional organization. I'd love to have a phone call and discuss some of the issues, and even involve some of our members if you think it would help.

Getting Zope Foundation in good shape is an important task, and what you're doing is much appreciated.

PS: And yes, I can't believe the Django conversion attempt. That was seriously funny, in a bad way. :)

Posted by Jens Vagelpohl at Wed Mar 18 2009 19:17

@Limi: I'd like to see an official communications channel, whatever that may look like, between the two foundations. I just added that as a task for the new board, we've been putting together a todo list for that purpose.

Posted by Martijn Faassen at Wed Mar 18 2009 19:37

I'd love to see more communication between the foundations. I've tried to establish one on and off through the last two years but we never really got it off the ground, also I think because the Plone Foundation itself was still busy finding its feet.

Lennart, anyway, now that we've all made our mistakes we can put all of this behind us, hopefully. Let's have a beer over it at Pycon indeed.

Posted by Lennart Regebro at Wed Mar 18 2009 20:00

Absolutely not. But I'll have a whisky. :)

Posted by Ruslan Spivak at Wed Mar 18 2009 23:51

Keep up your great work, Martijn.

Posted by Roman Lacko at Thu Mar 19 2009 10:55

I'm just some unknown person who is using zope for small project. Everythink i can say is, taht everytime i have some stupid questions, Martijn was one of first persons who has answers for me.
Thanks Martijn.

Posted by Tarek Ziadé at Thu Mar 19 2009 15:09

Thanks for your work Martijn. Please don't stop.

Don't feel bad about what happened, this is a tiny detail (that does not worth a blog entry imho or all that attention) compared to the work you have been doing for years for our community.

Posted by Martijn Faassen at Thu Mar 19 2009 16:09

Thanks for your support guys. I know it's just a tiny detail, and it's in the past now. It just caught me at the wrong moment.

Posted by Tony at Thu Mar 19 2009 23:43

Sorry if I offended you Martijn, as it certainly wasn't my intention. I've been aware of your work in the Zope community from a _long_ time ago, and misread your comment on chucking Zope.

Glad to see that tomorrow is another day ;)

regards,
Tone

Posted by Martijn Faassen at Fri Mar 20 2009 00:02

Tony, I wasn't offended, just amused. And I'm all for learning from what Django and all the others are doing right. One thing we're doing right is that we're still around and evolving.