The hcall service is for non-English speaking hotel guests
- 2017-11-30 hcall 1.0.0 release
- 2017-11-06 Initialize github repository.
A user is someone that uses our software. They contribute to the hcall projects by providing feedback to developers in the form of bug reports and feature suggestions. Users participate in the Apache community by helping other users on mailing lists and user support forums
A developer is a user who contributes to a project in the form of code or documentation. They take extra steps to participate in a project, are active on the developer mailing list, participate in discussions, provide patches, documentation, suggestions, and criticism. Developers are also known as contributors.
A committer is a developer that was given write access to the code repository and has a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA) on file. They have an apache.org mail address. Not needing to depend on other people for the patches, they are actually making short-term decisions for the project. The PMC can (even tacitly) agree and approve it into permanency, or they can reject it. Remember that the PMC makes the decisions, not the individual committers.
A PMC member is a developer or a committer that was elected due to merit for the evolution of the project and demonstration of commitment. They have write access to the code repository, an apache.org mail address, the right to vote for the community-related decisions and the right to propose an active user for committership. The PMC as a whole is the entity that controls the project, nobody else. In particular, the PMC must vote on any formal release of their project's software products.
Projects are normally auto governing and driven by the people who volunteer for the job. This is sometimes referred to as "do-ocracy" -- power of those who do. This functions well for most cases.
When coordination is required, decisions are taken with a lazy consensus approach: a few positive votes with no negative vote is enough to get going.
Voting is done with numbers: +1 -- a positive vote 0 -- abstain, have no opinion -1 -- a negative vote
The rules require that a negative vote includes an alternative proposal or a detailed explanation of the reasons for the negative vote. The community then tries to gather consensus on an alternative proposal that resolves the issue. In the great majority of cases, the concerns leading to the negative vote can be addressed. This process is called "consensus gathering" and we consider it a very important indication of a healthy community.
A projects use publicly archived mailing lists that anyone may subscribe to and/or ask questions related to our project.