(Just joined due to the Committer list's call to action). I think the question of Lab's identity is where it fits in the _modern_ ecosystem. Its original offering (VM, etc) as mentioned on some of the messages in the archive is not sustainable.
Github/Gitlab is more visible, offers more control and is integrated more with additional awesome services, never mind being a social-development destination. VMs are kind of cheap. I am putting a lot more than $5/month into my Open Source Project of Choice. Running a $5/month VM is just one of those things. And setting up VM with Labs is probably as - or more - difficult than doing it on Digital Ocean or whatever. So, is Labs then a sub-project level of offering to Apache Committers? Something that is smaller than a project but is still somehow "Apache"? Again, that does not seem to be enough of an incentive for technical reasons. What about for the community reasons? Can the identity be reformulated (or reinforced) to be a lot more about community than about technical offering? In fact, reading the By-laws, I get all warm and fuzzy and excited, especially about the last part of the last para: "Apache Labs are the place where ASF committers can work on innovative, blue-sky and off-the-wall ideas, without having to worry about fitting in an existing project bylaw or building a community around it, but unlike other external venues that can offer similar hosting services, as a place where fellow committers can offer suggestions and help." So, if _I_ was interpreting these ByLaws, I would sort of focus them inwards on a lot more dogfooding _across_ Apache projects with Labs being that inner space where different communities can meet. Ideally, it would give growth to tiger teams which brings together people from different projects who then, as a group, help out other Apache projects. To take a semi-technical example, it would be great to have somebody who has Technical Documentation skills, somebody who is good sysadmin and somebody who has good technical/demo building skills and them going around multiple Apache projects and helping them to build their "hello world" examples that make it easier for the beginners to get going. I bet after 3-5 runs through "take a project, build it, make a basic dockerized example for it, push the examples and bugs discovered back to the community", it will become an easy thing to do well. And most communities would love it. And Labs could be the space that sets up an infrastructure to help those people do it. Even if that infrastructure is not actually running on Apache Infra. Labs could also be the one with the strong Call to Action. I have search expertise for example (Apache Solr). I do a number of mini-projects around Solr that are not direct code contribution. I would be happy to step into other projects that are downstream from Solr and provide my Solr expertise to their committers by reviewing their setup or helping to explain to them why they have troubles migrating to latest Solr. But they don't really call and if they do call, most of the time, you are then expected to find your own path from the start to the level of contribution. If there was an umbrella of people helping to mentor people already in ASF into helping them to cross-contribute to other projects, this could be a lot easier. Labs could be one collecting such willing experts and connecting/enabling them. Could Labs be the place where people with different first language hang out and help to translate "Hello World" tutorials into other languages, using common infrastructure they don't have to reinvent. Discovery of educational resources for open-source projects is actually a big issue, giving a centralized space (basically a well-referenced blog) is a step in a right direction. Again, this could happen spontaneously by just individual efforts, but having a coordinated effort in removing all barriers towards that happening consistently and in repeated fashion, could encourage contributions. We already have http://community.apache.org/, which focuses on less technical aspects and on on-boarding (for those who find it, similar problem really....). Could Labs be complimentary to that, by focusing on technical aspects of building the community and focusing a lot more on getting more senior members of community to contribute back in in the mentoring ways? Now, this is very Blue Sky and I - for one - would not be in a position to lead this kind of evolution. But since Blue Sky is in the By-laws, I felt it was not unreasonable to express my thoughts. Regards, Alex. ---- http://www.solr-start.com/ - Resources for Solr users, new and experienced --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: labs-unsubscr...@labs.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: labs-h...@labs.apache.org
