Hi, On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 11:06 PM David P Grove <[email protected]> wrote: > ...I'd like to kick off a discussion to assess the project's readiness for > graduation from the incubator...
Thanks for starting this discussion! I think OpenWhisk is 99% ready to graduate and I'm looking forward to that, it's a great project with a great community. With my incubation mentor hat on, I think the role of the project's communications channels needs to be clarified before graduating. It is easy to get the impression that the vast majority of the project's business happens on Slack - maybe it's not really the case but I think having guidelines for how to use the various communications channels will help convince the Incubator that the project is following the Apache principles of inclusive communication. The ultimate goal of this is to promote the long-term health of the project by making sure things happen in the open and people can contribute in an asynchronous way, without having to be engaged full-time in the project. Quoting Mark Thomas (from Tomcat fame, current ASF Board Member) from a recent comdev discussion about this [3] : > ...The criteria that the ASF looks for in communication channels used by > projects are (in no particular order): > - open to all > - asynchronous > - available off-line > - full history > - searchable > - archived on ASF controlled systems > - low bandwidth / minimal system requirements ... I think the current setup used by OpenWhisk can meet these requirements, but I think one can also come to the conclusion that Slack is central to the project and one cannot really get involved without being active there "all the time". I'm pushing it a bit with such a statement but I think there's some truth in it, and the best way to demonstrate that it's false is to create a set of guidelines on how project contributors communicate. It's probably just a case of clarifying the http://openwhisk.apache.org/community.html page which is IMHO a too-long list of channels without a clear definition of how they should be used. Doesn't need to be complicated but needs to demonstrate how these communications follow the Apache principles of inclusiveness and durability. Assuming there's a strong preference for Slack vs. this list, which the current patterns seem to demonstrate, my preferred setup would be: -Slack is for throwaway near-real-time discussions -User questions should go somewhere else so as to be archived, discoverable etc. Stack Overflow maybe? I don't know how much it's currently used. -Any "important" technical discussions happen in Git tickets, pull requests or on this list -Regular news authored by committers are published on this list (and maybe also at openwhisk.apache.org or blogs.apache.org), pointing contributors (especially occasional and new ones) to important discussions, pull requests etc. That's just my personal view based on ensuring the sustainability of this project by exposing all communications in an accessible way. I'd appreciate the opinion of other mentors on this and I'm open to discussions about it, but I think clarifying and documenting how the project uses its various communications channels can be a great help for occasional and new contributors, which is key to a successful Apache project. > ...Per Rodric's recent stats [1], the community has developed nicely in terms > of code contribution.... The (great) numbers shown there make me think that more people might be eligible as OpenWhisk committers and PMC members, also in view of long-term project sustainability. This can happen after graduation but I think the Incubator will need reassurance that the PMC is actively looking for new committers and PMC members. -Bertrand > [1] > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/b2217c61caad5c7a0369699d06d44e5cf688d3cba982e354a45b8c78@%3Cdev.openwhisk.apache.org%3E > [2] > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=103091999 [3] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/1902f6ce3f508a2e57dc719fc042015707a46cdc3c6ec4c2715c87c2@%3Cdev.community.apache.org%3E
