[Members] Voting criteria

[Bart van Bragt]

Ulrich Staudinger wrote:
> I have to admit that i do not doubt the democratic approach - it's by 
> far the best approach to bring different opinions together.
Hmm, is it?

Just take a look at what's currently happening with the European 
'constitution'... The people have to vote but they have absolutely no 
clue what they are voting on. Besides that most democratic organisations 
end up with a LOT of talk an no action. Linux, Psi, Firefox, all very 
successful projects but they all have a very small number of people that 
are in charge and who decides what does and what doesn't get into the 
project.

IMO having a democratic project doesn't attract more developers. Your 
project just needs to be popular, accessible (documentation, readable 
code) and there needs to be strong leadership. Having something under 
the JSF flag doesn't guaranteee any of these points.

You might not enjoy writing documentation (neither do I :D) but I know 
that I really appreciate it if documentation is available. Imagine that 
you are someone that's building an application that needs to be able to 
communicate with other processes, or that you need to integrate IM 
featuers in your software. Where would you start? What documentation 
would you find? The current documentation for Jabber is either outdated 
or not complete. Just pointing at the RFCs and the JEPs is not the way 
to go IMO. IMO a lot can improve here which is also why I would welcome 
more people to the JSF with a less technical background. People that are 
good at marketing, copywriting, documenting, etc. It's really cool what 
Peter is doing for jabber.org but the site is far from optimal in it's 
current state. Making the XMPP/Jabber technology more accessible is 
beneficial to us al, it makes sure that there is a very low threshold 
for new users and new programmers. Much lower than it is today.

But I'm not sure if that is something for the JSF. Well, having a more 
attractive jabber.org page would be nice. But besides that creating 
documentation etc could very well be done outside of the JSF. Maybe we 
should concentrate on the certification program anyway. That is 
something where the JSF 'brand' could have extra value...

Bart