Following a first online call on January 18th, involving over 40 JUG leaders/members from around the world, the people behind the 'Adopt a JSR' program are hosting a follow up online meeting on Wednesday February 27th. The meeting, which will be hosted by Martijn Verburg from the London Java Community (LJC), Bruno Souza from SouJava, Arun Gupta from the Java EE/GlassFish team and Heather VanCura from the JCP program office,offers an opportunity to learn more about the program, and provide feedback. It is open to anyone.
The Adopt a JSR program was an idea that originated in the LJC around 12 months ago, but quickly became an international effort. More recently Oracle has also thrown its weight behind it.
The intention of the program is to encourage JUG members to get involved in a Java Specification Request (JSR) and to evangelise that JSR to their JUG and the wider Java community, in order to increase grass roots participation. The program currently has at least 19 international JUGs involved and is growing rapidly. When InfoQ spoke to Verburg about the program at QCon London last year, he told us
...the EJB 2.0, sort of semi disaster shall we say, it was simply a problem that developers were not involved early enough in designing the specification, testing the specification, seeing whether a standard even needed to evolve around that particular space. Sometimes there are certain technologies that are very new, that should not perhaps be standardized early on. Perhaps people should wait until there are some competing implementations.
As, previously to JCP.next, there were a lot of closed off mailing lists, closed off issue trackers, it was very hard for developers to get into JSRs. So the Adopt a JSR program also is kind of a bit of a PR effort to tell all the Java user group members that this is now an open process; you can now get involved and here is where you go to do that. Because when you talk with a typical Java developer on the street, they do not know what a JSR is; they don't even know what the JCP is. Yet it affects their working daily lives, so it is very important.
You can access the call via WebEx or audio.