My previous entry spoke of an open source project’s responsibility to keep their community informed. In that entry, I focused on a big part of a project’s outbound communcation: the project website. Communication, though, extends beyond outward communication. A successful project needs to be connected to the community and that connection works in two ways.
My longtime friend Donald Smith posted an unsolicited Tweet that made me think.
I pity the fool that tries to claim @waynebeaton didn’t give them enough warning to move off CVS at Eclipse Foundation…
— DonaldOJDK (@DonaldOJDK) December 11, 2012
It would indeed be very hard for an Eclipse committer to claim that we/I didn’t give them enough warning about our pending shutdown of CVS. For the last two years, we have leveraged every means of communication that we have available to us. We have discussed it during our quarterly Members’ Meetings. I have posted regularly about the pending shutdown on Twitter, blogs, newsletters, project (dev) mailing lists, and in my quasi-regular email to the members and committers.
In many cases, I have sent personal emails to project leads from my personal account after multiple failed attempts from my eclipse.org account led me to the conclusion that the eclipse.org domain must have been getting scooped up by a spam filter. If you’re not receiving regular communication from eclipse.org, then you may need to adjust the settings on your spam filter.
If the shutdown of CVS at Eclipse is a surprise to you, then you may need to re-evaluate how you interact with the community.
