On 21/07/2010 19:33, Shane Curcuru wrote:
I was just wondering...
The Labs project (a place where any committer can starup their own
independent mini-project to work on, potentially with other
committers) has been awfully quiet lately.
I was wondering: is doing an article or FAQ or some sort of mentor
outreach within ComDev a good way to increase the sense of community
within Labs?
Labs was specifically created as an infrastructure for collaboration.
There was never any intention for there to be community:
The aim is to provide the necessary resource to promote and maintain
the innovative power within the Apache community without the burden of
community building. [1]
Is this something comdev might have ideas about (by publicising to
committers or getting mentors to talk it up, or whatever)? Or am I just
having some wishful thinking?
I appreciate that community around labs and community around projects in
labs is potentially two different things. However, I don't see it as the
role of ComDev to define what community in labs means. I do have
opinions on the validity of a labs community and would be happy to
share those with the labs PMC if they care, this mail is written only
with my ComDev hat on.
With respect to the mentor programme I would be -1 on labs projects
being engaged in any way. Similarly I would discourage mentors from
pointing to labs as an example of community development (although as
volunteers I won't stop them from doing so). This should not reflect on
labs (which is a valuable project in the ASF) but rather it reflects the
goal of the mentoring programme. The goal is to teach people about
community development processes used in TLPs. Since the labs projects
explicitly ignore that kind of activity I don't see that there is any
overlap.
Speaking personally, I see labs as outside the current scope of ComDev
work. Of course, if the labs PMC want to use the ComDev vehicle, or if
someone in ComDev wants to work with the labs PMC, to do some outreach
that's a different case.
Ross
[1] http://labs.apache.org/
