Another frequent
pain point of mine revolves around shopping carts. More specifically, the things people do (or rather, don’t do) with them. For example, I often find myself reorganizing the corral in the parking lot of at Loblaw’s or Costco just so that vehicles (including mine) can get by. Are people so concerned with their own
interests that they can’t exert even a small amount of effort to return their carts in an semi-orderly fashion? Have we as a society become so preoccupied with our busy lives that we’ve forgotten simple things like common courtesy? Why is it that children so often seem to know better than we do? I was on a
Family Day walk to Starbucks with my kids few weeks ago when they discovered a couple of abandoned shopping carts at a strip mall. Watching them struggle to push the carts all the way to the other end of the mall so that they could be returned to the corral got me thinking…
What is it that makes a
community really successful? Is it not a critical mass of members that are
committed to doing
The Right Thing? Do the members of a community not get to decide what
The Right Thing is? What if those members don't see eye to eye? Are the inevitable
conflicts that arise not actually good for the
community in the end? Is conflict not a necessary prerequisite to growth?
Projects at Eclipse have a
responsibility to build and be responsive to three communities – contributors/committers, users, and adopters. What happens when what’s in the best interest of one of those communities is at odds with what’s in the best interest of another? I had to face a situation like this during the
Birds of a Feature session that I moderated recently at
EclipseCon 2008. The current leadership of the
UML2 Tools component stated that one of their goals, in attempting to address the needs of the
adopter community, was to regulate the
commoditization of UML tooling at Eclipse. Many of the attendees seemed surprised to learn this, and made it clear that while working towards eventually being able to completely generate tooling using
GMF is a noble pursuit, what the
user community really needs now is a set of robust,
usable editors for UML models. I’m quite happy with outcome of the session – representatives from at least four different parties (so far) have offered to pool their resources (nearly three times as many as the number of
committers on the current component) in building a complementary set of exemplary end-user UML tools at Eclipse (most likely as part of a new component of the
MDT project). Some may argue that this will only serve to further add to the confusion that already exists within the
Modeling project, but I’m not sure I agree. Regardless, I’m encouraged by the prospect of what appears to be a true community-driven initiative to do
The Right Thing at Eclipse...