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From: "Martin van den Bemt" <martin@isallineed.org>
To: <community@apache.org>
Subject: RE: ASF Membership Nomination
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 13:45:55 +0100
Message-ID: <NDBBLDFNNODMICGNKHGIAEAKAHAB.martin@isallineed.org>
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>
> How many folks have read the foundation pages at http://www.apache.org/
> before joining a project? The bylaws and public records of ASF? Read
> about other ASF projects? Learned what it is they're getting involved
> with? Googled a bit to find out how ASF interacts with the world? Or to
> see how and why other projects in the past have failed or succeeded?

To be specific to my situation : I use httpd (who doesn't;)) and I use a lot
of project that are on jakarta. You help others out on mailinglists,
encounter some problems, you send some patches, you send more patches, you
are nominated and become a committer to that project. Life goes on as
normal, untill you hear something about the board, PMC, elections (not
taling about voting rules, since you know them already big time by getting
involved in porjects), etc. You think hey intersting, what's that all about
;).
It's just a process of growth, which may evolve into bigger involvement in
apache itself (which makes you a possible candidate for membership).
It's nice to have some documents on all this stuff, but if you don't
experience it, it stays pretty much a document.

The same thing is with (almost) every newborn : he doesn't know everything
yet and should grow to get more involved or understand what "it" is all
about ;)

Mvgr,
Martin