My plan on OurMeteor

[laosb]

As a developer uses Meteor as primary framework, I love Meteor. I'm interested in helping Meteor out, but MDG is not interested in accepting contributions, and did delayed many good features for launching Galaxy, MDG's hosting service, and enterprise services. For now, Meteor developers are waiting for many features to land, like Node.js upgrading, WebWorker support, etc. How long it could be! Also, we didn't have many non-English materials, making Meteor hard to be understood by non-native English speakers. I'm not blaming MDG for offering Galaxy and other enterprise services. However, MDG did ignore many developers' voice. So I got a idea about setting up a organization, to deal with the current problem. Here're my suggestions on setting up OurMeteor:

• Set up i18n teams like Node.js, and let them do i18n works, from community Meteor homepage to docs.
• Set up a community-driven Meteor homepage, which focus on Meteor itself, not MDG. Meteor.com is Meteor's official site, but nowadays it looks more like MDG's official site, which have a lot of information that developers don't ever need. We can have a community site which provides a lot of learning materials, most voted new features and more.
• Set up a tech committee to do tech things. They should be elected by community, and had experience in Meteor itself. They should have write access to meteor/meteor and any other opensource subprojects, and merge PRs which are GTM. Maybe for these PRs, one MDG LGTM is required at least.
• Set up committees to maintain subprojects/modules which MDG has no interest in maintaining. For example, meteor/blaze. It's unlikely to be continued by MDG while it looks like @mitar is going to take over. Our community could help him.

In this way, community can add the features they want and MDG can do their business.

I want to say, the real problem is that, MDG is just confused about their role in Meteor. Meteor should be a opensource project maintained by both community members and MDG, and MDG shouldn't become a barrier on the road of contributing. It's time for community to share the both right and responsibility of maintaining Meteor itself.

PS: I've bought ourmeteor.com for it. Any suggestions are welcomed!

[mitar]

Ha ha. You are not the first one thinking about a fork. :-) See discussions here:

• https://github.com/MeteorCommunity/discussions/issues/44
• https://forums.meteor.com/t/meteor-community-driven-fork/15932
• https://forums.meteor.com/t/searching-for-a-name-for-a-meteor-fork/17897

Also in general, that MeteorCommunity repository contains already a great deal of Meteor users: https://github.com/MeteorCommunity/discussions/issues

I would suggest that we move discussion there, if we want to reopen it, instead of creating one more repository.

For now, I think I personally will still wait a bit for MDG to get their stuff together. They are promising to open this. And then if they do not do anything in a month or so, I think I will also have enough and will be open for a fork. I also have some nice organization names registered for that.

Otherwise, I completely agree with everything I wrote.

But just to be clear, I do not see me as somebody taking over Blaze. I am just helping because I have some knowledge of internals and I have some outstanding things I know we could bugfix. But the future is more or less in the hands of the community. At least at the moment I am giving my inputs more as a fellow community member and not as a leader or anything. I do not see myself in this role nor I do think I have time for this role.

[helfer]

I want to say, the real problem is that, MDG is just confused about their role in Meteor. Meteor should be a opensource project maintained by both community members and MDG, and MDG shouldn't become a barrier on the road of contributing. It's time for community to share the both right and responsibility of maintaining Meteor itself.

I am a bit surprised to read this. It would have made sense a few months ago, but recently I think MDG has made it very clear that we are working on making community contributions to Meteor's core much easier, with the goal of developing and maintaining Meteor together with the community.

We want to make that happen as soon as you do, but unfortunately it's not something that can be done from one day to the next. It takes careful planning and quite a bit of work to get there: Meteor is a very large project and has many moving parts, so making it a true community project isn't as easy as giving more people write access to meteor/meteor. It's a gradual process that we've started, and there are many steps along the way, such as:

• splitting up core into smaller, more maintainable packages that could stand on their own
• making integration testing easier, so PRs can be merged with more confidence
• working out an organizational structure and deciding on responsibilities
• etc.

If you want to contribute actively, that's great! We're open to suggestions for ways to speed up the process, and hope that in the meantime you and others will make use of the opportunities for contributing that already exist.

That said, I'd prefer to keep the discussion in one place. It's also better to discuss this on the forum, because more people will see it, so let's continue the discussion there: https://forums.meteor.com/t/community-help-with-issue-triage/21805/25

[laosb]

@mitar I think there is an misunderstanding. I am not doing a fork, instead I'm trying to solve some problems in community participation. For now we don't have an organization of open governance, and MDG said they're considering to make some community members have write access. Let an open organization to hold the elections is a better choice instead of doing election by a company.

[laosb]

@helfer I'm truly agree with you in fact. Setting up this organization is just my thoughts on how to improve community participation. For example It's easier for MDG to just give write access to core committee of OurMeteor, as they're elected by community, and there is no more things like "that community member shouldn't be selected to do it!"

[mitar]

Let an open organization to hold the elections is a better choice instead of doing election by a company.

That is true.

But besides elections, you are also already proposing a plan for this particular GitHub organization. This looks to me like a fork. All this discussion could be done on forums first.

So while I agree in spirit with what you are trying to achieve, and I love dooacracy, I am not sure if asking people to come to a new place to discuss it is the most inclusive way to get community input. As I said, if you thought that forums and Blaze repository are not neutral enough, you could just use https://github.com/MeteorCommunity/discussions, why one more?

[laosb]

@mitar That's mainly because imo this topic is just about setting up OurMeteor or something like that. If it's about something widely about open governance, I would post it where you mentioned.

[mitar]

So yes, I think we discussed it in Blaze tickets that it seems community prefer to create a stand-alone organization for Meteor packages, where per-package repositories would be. So you are doing that? This is great.

[laosb]

@mitar right. Actually more than an organization for packages.

[laosb]

@mitar So should we invite community members and try to make this transition now, or wait for MDG's opinion?

[mitar]

I really love your enthusiasm! But as I wrote previously, I think we should wait for green-light from MDG. There are some questions which we need input on:

• are they OK with having per-package repositories inside one organization, which what seems to be what community would like to see
• are they OK with community creating visual presentation for Blaze
• do they have some preferences about the name of the organization

BTW, talking about decisions without consulting the community, I think we should also discuss with the community what the name of an organization should be. I think it is good to propose names, and reserve domain names and GitHub names, but a bit how you are pulling this off now feels a bit forcing. The conversation until now did not even mention your proposal of "ourmeteor". You did not get input from the community. And you are trying to get community to participate in this repository when there are already other similar spaces for community to discuss.

So, while I appreciate that you do not have patience anymore, I think you are not doing community a favor by introducing even more chaos to the whole situation.

[laosb]

@mitar Name is really not a very important thing to consider, as we have even few guys which has an interest in it. It's much important to have a consensus on the detailed ways to achieve. Btw, it's OurMeteor not ownmeteor. I agree with you on the first two points. People can easily lose interest by being told to something which doesn't make much sense before.