On 11/19/07, Bertrand Delacretaz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I like the idea: discuss initial diversity among the Incubator PMC, > when a new project comes in, with the option of limiting the number of > initial non-ASF committers. But no hard rules on that. > > This might be easier to implement than having hard rules for initial > diversity. The problem is that such a discussion would be subjective, > are people comfortable with that? I'd be ok with trying that for a > given period, and re-evaluating later. >
I think we can throw the ball back into the court of the new podling: how are they going to address increasing the diversity of the community. As the IPMC we could state that the podling is not diverse and that we want a more balanced initial committers list before accepting the proposal. The podling should then decide how they are going to address the IPMC's concerns: - only mentors are on the PPMC and committers list, each committer has to gain merit - limit the number of committers from one organization to an acceptable number - something else I haven't come up with These rules are different for different incubating communities: when a proposal comes in with 3 developers from 1 organization, that is a different situation than a proposal with 15 developers and 10 coming in from one organization. The former could just state that they will strive to accept only new developers from other organizations in the first couple of months to increase the diversity. The latter could opt for only allowing 5 initial committers from the big organization (or any number that would make us feel less queazy). The biggest problem I see is that the organization that wants to donate the project will have a hard time letting go of control because they have a vested interest in the product. However that is exactly what they need to do when they move the project to Apache: they have to hand the project over to the community and need to learn to work with the community instead of regulate it. Of course this doesn't concern (immediately) already established open source projects that seek to join the foundation to strengthen their community. For example Roller, Wicket and JspWiki are established projects that moved (or are moving) to the foundation with their community intact, and I wouldn't have them in any other way. Martijn -- Buy Wicket in Action: http://manning.com/dashorst Apache Wicket 1.3.0-rc1 is released Get it now: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/wicket/1.3.0-rc1/