Re: What constitute a successful project?
Hi all. I've been following this discussion for a while, collecting my thoughts. I think I've actually come around to Eric Y's feeling here: the project is closer to graduation than to retirement. Chukwa, as a community, has a few distinctive features. The system is specialized big-data infrastructure, and it's mature enough to be used in production. That has a few consequences: 1) It's not going to have a high rate of change; it's more maintenance than new development. 2) It's not going to be an easy project for hobbyists to contribute to, since testing requires access to big infrastructure for extended periods. 3) There is a small set of highly motivated users, who are really using the code, and therefore have strong incentives to keep the project healthy. My sense is that the community is needed more for support and maintenance than for major rewriting. And my sense is that the community is able to do that. As Eric points out, there have been a bunch of patches from people who weren't original core developers. As part of the podling growth strategy: I think it would be good to cut some releases. Let's see if the community has enough energy to test and vote on release candidates. Let's see how well people understand the Apache release process. I'd like, if possible, for somebody new to be the release manager. Eric and I have both cut releases before and I would take it as a strong good sign if somebody new stepped up. If the community has enough energy and activity to respond to user queries and to do regular releases,I would think it was a plausible graduation candidate. --Ari On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 2:12 AM, Eric Yang eric...@gmail.com wrote: Continue the retirement vote, and see if it passes in IPMC. If it does, I will gladly setup shop in github. If it doesn't, Chukwa community should prepare for Chukwa 0.6.0 release, and start voting on Chukwa 0.6.0 release, and follow by vote for graduation. Content in Chukwa trunk contains a number of good features and fixes generated by the community. I really appreciate the support by Incubator community to make this possible. Does this sound like a plan? -- Ari Rabkin asrab...@gmail.com Princeton Computer Science Department - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Apache is a non-profit organization. If we restrict our thinking model to metrics of how many developers, and how many patches are committed in pre-defeined time limit. There is no software that is gong to succeed in this evaluation other than commercial software. Paid developers are contributing to the software that meeting cooperate interests at rapid pace, and smaller companies will work together until cooperate interests tear apart the software, or the funding eventually dry up and the software cease to exist, and the community will eventually fall apart. Good software usually comes down to a few individuals who work hard to enable the community to flourish. Many of the good software takes decades to develop from hobby projects. I will accept the voting result from IPMC, and I wish IPMC would use better human sense to enable future project to flourish. Chris Douglas resigned from mentor position, therefore, Chukwa will need a new mentor, and one of Chukwa contributor Sourygna Luangsay volunteer to be the motivator for Chukwa development if Chukwa is voted to stay for another 6 months. regards, Eric On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:20 PM, Bernd Fondermann bernd.fonderm...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: As I mentioned in an earlier email, we did have this conversation seven months ago. We came to a consensus to give it another try. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. That doesn't take away the fact that there are still people who are clearly interested in continuing work on the project. Instead of telling the community to pick up their toys and leave, I'd much rather ask them to come up with a credible alternative. The failure of past attempts to grow the community does not necessarily mean that future attempts will also fail, so I'd give the community the benefit of doubt as long as there are new ideas and people willing to try them. If I understand correctly the problems in Chukwa are two-fold: 1) the community isn't diverse, i.e. there are only few people involved, and 2) the community isn't active, in that even the involved people don't have too many cycles to spend on the project. Thus I'd raise the following questions to Eric and others who want to keep Chukwa alive at the ASF: a) Is it reasonable to expect existing community members to become more active in near future? If yes, will such increased activity be sustainable over a longer period of time? Why? IIUC there was some recent legal progress that might help here. What would be the best way to measure the expected increase in activity? b) How do you expect to get more people involved in the project? What concrete actions will be taken to increase the chances of new contributors showing up? Why do you believe these things will work better than the mentioned earlier attempts at growing the community? Good ideas of concrete actions are for example cutting new releases, improving project documentation, presenting the project at various venues, simplifying the project build and initial setup, and giving more timely answers and feedback to new users and contributors (see also my observation from October [1]). How can we best tell whether such efforts are working? Coming up with good answers to such questions is not necessarily easy (and it's fine if not all of them can yet be answered), but going through that effort should give us a good reason to continue the incubation of Chukwa at least for a few more months until we should start seeing some concrete and sustainable improvements in community activity and diversity. This is exactly what we did for the last months (years, actually). Give it yet more time. Honestly, I don't understand why we should continue in this mode for another few months when it failed for the past years. Is this the extra-bonus IPMC time? The legal issues only made it more clear to me that and why this Incubation failed. The much I'd love to see Chukwa fly, this is getting ridiculous. Bernd - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Hi, On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Eric Yang eric...@gmail.com wrote: Apache is a non-profit organization. If we restrict our thinking model to metrics of how many developers, and how many patches are committed in pre-defeined time limit. Chukwa has soon spent four years incubating, with the activity level dropping off significantly after the first year or two. We have quite a few examples of projects where such history predicts the eventual dissolution of the entire community. There are however also a few cases where the community has been able to revive itself. The question here isn't about exact metrics or some predefined level of activity that the project should be able to reach, but rather the trajectory you're on. Is there a reasonable expectation that Chukwa can reverse the downward trend in activity? What are you going to do to make that happen? As discussed, you already tried a few things to revive the community earlier on. What makes this time different? Why would another say six months help if the previous ones didn't? BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Hi, On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote: Chukwa has soon spent four years incubating, with the activity level dropping off significantly after the first year or two. Sorry, correction: Chukwa has been incubating since July 2010 after being a part of Hadoop earlier. Got confused by the longer mailing list and commit histories. The basic premise still stands, Chukwa was a lot more active in 2009/10 than it is now. BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Hi, On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Bernd Fondermann bernd.fonderm...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote: This is exactly what we did for the last months (years, actually). Give it yet more time. Honestly, I don't understand why we should continue in this mode for another few months when it failed for the past years. Is this the extra-bonus IPMC time Thinking in general not on this specific case, may be we can define a formal warning for retirement for podlings where the PPMC has to come up with a concrete plans for the next six months and some measurable goals. Once the formal warning is issued, it can be processed by the clutch [1] and also show the elapsed time. In 3 months, 6 months, 9 months mentors and IPMC can decide whether to remove the warning or not. After one year, if there is no significant change and the goals are not archived, IPMC can easily decide in favor of retirement because they know the history of the issue. At the same time, every three months until retirement PPMC will be notified that they are still under the warning (I think this is somewhat happening even now, as I've seen from Jukka's replies to the board reports), so they will have reasonable time to take action. Of course, we don't need a process like this in the case of the PPMC unanimously agree for retirement. Best Regards, Nandana [1] - http://incubator.apache.org/clutch.html
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 9:08 AM, Eric Yang eric...@gmail.com wrote: Apache is a non-profit organization. If we restrict our thinking model to metrics of how many developers, and how many patches are committed in pre-defeined time limit. There is no software that is gong to succeed in this evaluation other than commercial software. Paid developers are contributing to the software that meeting cooperate interests at rapid pace, and smaller companies will work together until cooperate interests tear apart the software, or the funding eventually dry up and the software cease to exist, and the community will eventually fall apart. We don't only apply metrics, otherwise this decision would be very easy, and we'd not have that discussion right now. One other aspect for example is that there's no Chukwa release for a long time. There are a lot of hard and soft facts I personally take into account for any vote. Good software usually comes down to a few individuals who work hard to enable the community to flourish. Many of the good software takes decades to develop from hobby projects. As long as these few indivduals are actually there, nobody would close a project. I will accept the voting result from IPMC, and I wish IPMC would use better human sense to enable future project to flourish. This sounds like you're frustrated with your mentors. I'm sorry for that and take part of the responsibility of Chukwa's failure. But really only a part. Chris Douglas resigned from mentor position, therefore, Chukwa will need a new mentor, and one of Chukwa contributor Sourygna Luangsay volunteer to be the motivator for Chukwa development if Chukwa is voted to stay for another 6 months. Everyone is welcome to contribute, vote (even if non-binding) and take part in discussion. (Hey, people, if you're out there, post to the list!) Not much of this happened over the last months. Bernd - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 27, 2012, at 3:08 AM, Eric Yang eric...@gmail.com wrote: Apache is a non-profit organization. If we restrict our thinking model to metrics of how many developers, and how many patches are committed in pre-defeined time limit. There is no software that is gong to succeed in this evaluation other than commercial software. Paid developers are contributing to the software that meeting cooperate interests at rapid pace, and smaller companies will work together until cooperate interests tear apart the software, or the funding eventually dry up and the software cease to exist, and the community will eventually fall apart. Good software usually comes down to a few individuals who work hard to enable the community to flourish. Many of the good software takes decades to develop from hobby projects. I will accept the voting result from IPMC, and I wish IPMC would use better human sense to enable future project to flourish. Hi Eric, Its good to see Jukka and Ant stepping up as mentors, may be that will give you Chukwa one more chance. From browsing through the private list and the general list, I see lots of philosophical arguments and how you will bring in your patches now that legal review at your employer is over. Ofcourse you mention new volunteers too. But so far I haven't seen an answer from you or other Chukwa PPMC what have you done previously to grow the community, what did not work and what is the change in plan now? I see multiple variants of this question has been asked quite a few times in the last couple of days and I am eager to see an answer from the Chukwa PPMC. Suresh Chris Douglas resigned from mentor position, therefore, Chukwa will need a new mentor, and one of Chukwa contributor Sourygna Luangsay volunteer to be the motivator for Chukwa development if Chukwa is voted to stay for another 6 months. regards, Eric On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:20 PM, Bernd Fondermann bernd.fonderm...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: As I mentioned in an earlier email, we did have this conversation seven months ago. We came to a consensus to give it another try. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. That doesn't take away the fact that there are still people who are clearly interested in continuing work on the project. Instead of telling the community to pick up their toys and leave, I'd much rather ask them to come up with a credible alternative. The failure of past attempts to grow the community does not necessarily mean that future attempts will also fail, so I'd give the community the benefit of doubt as long as there are new ideas and people willing to try them. If I understand correctly the problems in Chukwa are two-fold: 1) the community isn't diverse, i.e. there are only few people involved, and 2) the community isn't active, in that even the involved people don't have too many cycles to spend on the project. Thus I'd raise the following questions to Eric and others who want to keep Chukwa alive at the ASF: a) Is it reasonable to expect existing community members to become more active in near future? If yes, will such increased activity be sustainable over a longer period of time? Why? IIUC there was some recent legal progress that might help here. What would be the best way to measure the expected increase in activity? b) How do you expect to get more people involved in the project? What concrete actions will be taken to increase the chances of new contributors showing up? Why do you believe these things will work better than the mentioned earlier attempts at growing the community? Good ideas of concrete actions are for example cutting new releases, improving project documentation, presenting the project at various venues, simplifying the project build and initial setup, and giving more timely answers and feedback to new users and contributors (see also my observation from October [1]). How can we best tell whether such efforts are working? Coming up with good answers to such questions is not necessarily easy (and it's fine if not all of them can yet be answered), but going through that effort should give us a good reason to continue the incubation of Chukwa at least for a few more months until we should start seeing some concrete and sustainable improvements in community activity and diversity. This is exactly what we did for the last months (years, actually). Give it yet more time. Honestly, I don't understand why we should continue in this mode for another few months when it failed for the past years. Is this the extra-bonus IPMC time? The legal issues only made it more clear to me that and why this Incubation failed. The much I'd love to see Chukwa fly, this is getting
Re: What constitute a successful project?
As chair of the IPMC, I do not think that it is appropriate to have a vote to continue incubation for six months, with no consideration of success in between. I think that it would be reasonable to put aside the vote to retire, and expect a plan, with contributions from more than one non-mentor, in the next month, and some progress after that. I also think it would be within the mission and discretion of the committee to go ahead and vote to retire. If it's really true that recently resolved legal muddles have been the one barrier to success, then the removal of that barrier should unleash some fairly substantial results. To address the more philosophical discussion here: The incubator is a structure set up to bootstrap communities. It's not the only possible structure of this kind, and it's not necessarily the best one. Like everything else at a *volunteer* organization, it is constrained by the amount of volunteer labor available. In a perfect world, yes, the Foundation might operate a sort of home-for-small-projects. Such a structure would allow arbitrarily small projects to benefit from Foundation infrastructure and legal benefits. However, this isn't a perfect world, and we are indeed very constrained by the volunteer labor, and so we aren't providing a home for years on end. There are other ways for this project to succeed other than as an Apache TLP. You could find a related, existing, project, and merge into them. You could set up shop on github. On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 7:36 AM, Suresh Marru sma...@apache.org wrote: On Nov 27, 2012, at 3:08 AM, Eric Yang eric...@gmail.com wrote: Apache is a non-profit organization. If we restrict our thinking model to metrics of how many developers, and how many patches are committed in pre-defeined time limit. There is no software that is gong to succeed in this evaluation other than commercial software. Paid developers are contributing to the software that meeting cooperate interests at rapid pace, and smaller companies will work together until cooperate interests tear apart the software, or the funding eventually dry up and the software cease to exist, and the community will eventually fall apart. Good software usually comes down to a few individuals who work hard to enable the community to flourish. Many of the good software takes decades to develop from hobby projects. I will accept the voting result from IPMC, and I wish IPMC would use better human sense to enable future project to flourish. Hi Eric, Its good to see Jukka and Ant stepping up as mentors, may be that will give you Chukwa one more chance. From browsing through the private list and the general list, I see lots of philosophical arguments and how you will bring in your patches now that legal review at your employer is over. Ofcourse you mention new volunteers too. But so far I haven't seen an answer from you or other Chukwa PPMC what have you done previously to grow the community, what did not work and what is the change in plan now? I see multiple variants of this question has been asked quite a few times in the last couple of days and I am eager to see an answer from the Chukwa PPMC. Suresh Chris Douglas resigned from mentor position, therefore, Chukwa will need a new mentor, and one of Chukwa contributor Sourygna Luangsay volunteer to be the motivator for Chukwa development if Chukwa is voted to stay for another 6 months. regards, Eric On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:20 PM, Bernd Fondermann bernd.fonderm...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: As I mentioned in an earlier email, we did have this conversation seven months ago. We came to a consensus to give it another try. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. That doesn't take away the fact that there are still people who are clearly interested in continuing work on the project. Instead of telling the community to pick up their toys and leave, I'd much rather ask them to come up with a credible alternative. The failure of past attempts to grow the community does not necessarily mean that future attempts will also fail, so I'd give the community the benefit of doubt as long as there are new ideas and people willing to try them. If I understand correctly the problems in Chukwa are two-fold: 1) the community isn't diverse, i.e. there are only few people involved, and 2) the community isn't active, in that even the involved people don't have too many cycles to spend on the project. Thus I'd raise the following questions to Eric and others who want to keep Chukwa alive at the ASF: a) Is it reasonable to expect existing community members to become more active in near future? If yes, will such increased activity be sustainable over a longer period of
Re: What constitute a successful project?
The more the merrier! :) Regards, Alan On Nov 26, 2012, at 11:50 PM, ant elder wrote: Great to hear, one month seemed too short to accomplish so much. I'd be happy to volunteer as another mentor if some fresh eyes will help. ...ant On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 3:32 AM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: If we decide to give the podling another chance I would prefer to give it another six months rather than just one month. I don't think that a lot can reasonably be accomplished in one month. I would also like to see some milestones set in those six months. If the milestones are met or not met then the decision at the end of six months will be less contentious. Thoughts? Regards, Alan On Nov 26, 2012, at 4:39 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) wrote: +1 to Jukka's suggestion here. The world isn't going to end if we give them another month, and beyond that, it will give someone besides Eric the opportunity to help cruft the plan (hopefully 2 people besides Eric, since that would mean 3 active peeps in the community). If that plan can't be achieved in a month, I'm +1 to retire. Cheers, Chris On Nov 26, 2012, at 3:21 PM, Jukka Zitting wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: Even by the PPMC's comments they obliquely acknowledge that there's not much activity and expressed an interested in simply keeping it around with the hopes that something would happen; there were no concrete ideas or plans on how to grow the community because, by their own admission, no one has the time to work much on the project. That lack of concrete plans is a good place to start. Anyone from the community who opposes retirement should take it up on themselves to provide such a concrete plan for example in time for next month's report. Just like the caster of a technical veto should come up with an alternative implementation. :-) As an example of how this can play out, see the way we asked Kitty to provide such a plan [1] when some members of the community opposed the idea of retirement. In Kitty nobody stood up to the task, so a few months later the final decision to retire the project was a pretty easy one to make. Another example with a different outcome is JSPWiki that had a similar discussion at the beginning of the year, and actually a few members of the community did start working through all the issues and have now produced their first Apache release and seem to be on a path towards graduation even though the project is still far below its past activity. [1] http://markmail.org/message/smhl3cxvrgq5cf22 BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 27, 2012, at 12:08 AM, Eric Yang wrote: Apache is a non-profit organization. If we restrict our thinking model to metrics of how many developers, and how many patches are committed in pre-defeined time limit. There is no software that is gong to succeed in this evaluation other than commercial software. Paid developers are contributing to the software that meeting cooperate interests at rapid pace, and smaller companies will work together until cooperate interests tear apart the software, or the funding eventually dry up and the software cease to exist, and the community will eventually fall apart. Good software usually comes down to a few individuals who work hard to enable the community to flourish. Many of the good software takes decades to develop from hobby projects. I will accept the voting result from IPMC, and I wish IPMC would use better human sense to enable future project to flourish. The ASF is not about code. It's about community. You cannot have a community of one. There are many high quality software projects that are being developed by lone coders. You'll find them on GitHub, SourceForge, etc. Chris Douglas resigned from mentor position, therefore, Chukwa will need a new mentor, and one of Chukwa contributor Sourygna Luangsay volunteer to be the motivator for Chukwa development if Chukwa is voted to stay for another 6 months. Sourygna needs to step up and volunteer on his own. But, to my mind, we have more than enough cheerleaders. We need coders. JMHO. Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 27, 2012, at 12:49 AM, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya wrote: Hi, On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Bernd Fondermann bernd.fonderm...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote: This is exactly what we did for the last months (years, actually). Give it yet more time. Honestly, I don't understand why we should continue in this mode for another few months when it failed for the past years. Is this the extra-bonus IPMC time Thinking in general not on this specific case, may be we can define a formal warning for retirement for podlings where the PPMC has to come up with a concrete plans for the next six months and some measurable goals. Once the formal warning is issued, it can be processed by the clutch [1] and also show the elapsed time. In 3 months, 6 months, 9 months mentors and IPMC can decide whether to remove the warning or not. After one year, if there is no significant change and the goals are not archived, IPMC can easily decide in favor of retirement because they know the history of the issue. At the same time, every three months until retirement PPMC will be notified that they are still under the warning (I think this is somewhat happening even now, as I've seen from Jukka's replies to the board reports), so they will have reasonable time to take action. Of course, we don't need a process like this in the case of the PPMC unanimously agree for retirement. The first sign of a broken organization is when it decides to add more process to fix things. I will remind the IPMC that seven months ago the specter of retirement was raised. A lengthy discussion ensued. Consensus was garnered. We even added committers with the hopes of infusing new energy into the project. It had no effect. Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: ...I will remind the IPMC that seven months ago the specter of retirement was raised. A lengthy discussion ensued. Consensus was garnered. We even added committers with the hopes of infusing new energy into the project... URLs? My brain's too small to remember all these discussions ;-) -Bertrand - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 27, 2012, at 4:13 AM, Bernd Fondermann wrote: I will accept the voting result from IPMC, and I wish IPMC would use better human sense to enable future project to flourish. This sounds like you're frustrated with your mentors. I'm sorry for that and take part of the responsibility of Chukwa's failure. But really only a part. I take an oblique offense to this statement. It is the responsibility of the project's community to get things off the ground. Mentors can make the extra effort, to be sure. But we have to be careful about becoming a crutch. Sometimes bad things happen to good projects. Eric has been heroic in trying to keep things afloat but sometimes that dog won't hunt. We as a IPMC have to be prepared for the time when a podling just won't get off the ground and everyone but a lone developer sees it. Regards, Alan
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 27, 2012, at 6:35 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: ...I will remind the IPMC that seven months ago the specter of retirement was raised. A lengthy discussion ensued. Consensus was garnered. We even added committers with the hopes of infusing new energy into the project... URLs? My brain's too small to remember all these discussions ;-) It's on the private Chukwa list. How can I get these URLs? Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Hi, On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:49 AM, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya nandana@gmail.com wrote: Thinking in general not on this specific case, may be we can define a formal warning for retirement for podlings where the PPMC has to come up with a concrete plans for the next six months and some measurable goals. A podling, regardless of its state, should always have such a concrete plan - the plan towards graduation. If a podling doesn't have such a (at least unwritten) plan, the mentors and the broader IPMC should remind the project about it. Such reminders are a big part of how we've been able to push so many podlings forward during this year. If a podling can't or won't come up with a credible graduation plan (be it because of lack of activity or other reasons like licensing issues), its time to retire the podling. BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
RE: What constitute a successful project?
-Original Message- From: Alan Cabrera [mailto:l...@toolazydogs.com] Sent: 27 November 2012 14:30 To: general@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: What constitute a successful project? On Nov 27, 2012, at 12:49 AM, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya wrote: Hi, On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Bernd Fondermann bernd.fonderm...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote: This is exactly what we did for the last months (years, actually). Give it yet more time. Honestly, I don't understand why we should continue in this mode for another few months when it failed for the past years. Is this the extra-bonus IPMC time Thinking in general not on this specific case, may be we can define a formal warning for retirement for podlings where the PPMC has to come up with a concrete plans for the next six months and some measurable goals. Once the formal warning is issued, it can be processed by the clutch [1] and also show the elapsed time. In 3 months, 6 months, 9 months mentors and IPMC can decide whether to remove the warning or not. After one year, if there is no significant change and the goals are not archived, IPMC can easily decide in favor of retirement because they know the history of the issue. At the same time, every three months until retirement PPMC will be notified that they are still under the warning (I think this is somewhat happening even now, as I've seen from Jukka's replies to the board reports), so they will have reasonable time to take action. Of course, we don't need a process like this in the case of the PPMC unanimously agree for retirement. The first sign of a broken organization is when it decides to add more process to fix things. Whilst broken organisation might be a bit strong I do agree with the general observation here. What is described above is exactly what mentors should be doing in an informal way. What Alan says happened below is what is proposed above. I've not been following the project and can't agree or disagree with Alan's interpretation of events. However, I also don't feel well enough informed to form a valuable opinion. This prompts the question have those demanding an alternative action to that one recommended by an active mentor done sufficient background work to be able to stand behind their recommendation? On the other hand, if people want to step up to bring new blood to the mentorship role and Alan wanted to resign as a mentor rather than flog a dead horse I'd fully understand. I support Alans observations elsewhere that mentors taking on responsibility for community development is inappropriate, it needs to be the project community, but new mentoring might provide new ideas. Ross I will remind the IPMC that seven months ago the specter of retirement was raised. A lengthy discussion ensued. Consensus was garnered. We even added committers with the hopes of infusing new energy into the project. It had no effect. Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: On Nov 27, 2012, at 6:35 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: ...URLs? My brain's too small to remember all these discussions ;-) It's on the private Chukwa list. How can I get these URLs?... Message-ID is fine in this case - sorry I thought you were referring to public discussions. -Bertrand - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 27, 2012, at 6:58 AM, Ross Gardler wrote: What is described above is exactly what mentors should be doing in an informal way. What Alan says happened below is what is proposed above. I've not been following the project and can't agree or disagree with Alan's interpretation of events. However, I also don't feel well enough informed to form a valuable opinion. This prompts the question have those demanding an alternative action to that one recommended by an active mentor done sufficient background work to be able to stand behind their recommendation? On the other hand, if people want to step up to bring new blood to the mentorship role and Alan wanted to resign as a mentor rather than flog a dead horse I'd fully understand. I support Alans observations elsewhere that mentors taking on responsibility for community development is inappropriate, it needs to be the project community, but new mentoring might provide new ideas. I don't intend to step down. I don't quit because things become difficult, frustrating, and prior efforts are unrecognized. New ideas from fresh mentors would be fantastic. However, I will not support throwing in fresh cheerleaders into an empty stadium where the football players have no time to play. For me, I need to see the Chukwa PPMC members take a personal inventory as to what they can honestly commit to doing. If that commitment is different than what was discussed last week then I would be absolutely delighted to have an extension of six months. Regards, Alan
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Unless there are compelling reason to stop, i.e continuing breaches of basic ASF polices and principles, then where possible letting a poddling continue incubation or just graduate seems better to me than making them go elsewhere. Its not like a small slow problem is chewing up ASF resources, but i understand not everyone here agrees with my views on that. Wink is an example of poddling in similar circumstances and there we are about to have decided that graduation is better than retirement. Perhaps thats a better approach. I don't recall a graduation recommendation request from the Incubator has ever been rejected by the board so perhaps the Incubator is too conservative with graduation recommendations. Its interesting comparing Wink and Chukwa. From many perspectives Chukwa is much more active than Wink but we're about to graduate Wink and talking about retiring this one. I've not yet had a chance to go through all the Chukwa archives but unless i'm misunderstanding something Chukwa isn't just a lone coder, there have been several committers in the last months and while one is doing the majority of the commits many of those are actually applying patches from other people, so it looks like there are a bunch of people out there working on the project and we need to find ways of better integrating them into the poddling community. ...ant On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Benson Margulies bimargul...@gmail.comwrote: As chair of the IPMC, I do not think that it is appropriate to have a vote to continue incubation for six months, with no consideration of success in between. I think that it would be reasonable to put aside the vote to retire, and expect a plan, with contributions from more than one non-mentor, in the next month, and some progress after that. I also think it would be within the mission and discretion of the committee to go ahead and vote to retire. If it's really true that recently resolved legal muddles have been the one barrier to success, then the removal of that barrier should unleash some fairly substantial results. To address the more philosophical discussion here: The incubator is a structure set up to bootstrap communities. It's not the only possible structure of this kind, and it's not necessarily the best one. Like everything else at a *volunteer* organization, it is constrained by the amount of volunteer labor available. In a perfect world, yes, the Foundation might operate a sort of home-for-small-projects. Such a structure would allow arbitrarily small projects to benefit from Foundation infrastructure and legal benefits. However, this isn't a perfect world, and we are indeed very constrained by the volunteer labor, and so we aren't providing a home for years on end. There are other ways for this project to succeed other than as an Apache TLP. You could find a related, existing, project, and merge into them. You could set up shop on github. On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 7:36 AM, Suresh Marru sma...@apache.org wrote: On Nov 27, 2012, at 3:08 AM, Eric Yang eric...@gmail.com wrote: Apache is a non-profit organization. If we restrict our thinking model to metrics of how many developers, and how many patches are committed in pre-defeined time limit. There is no software that is gong to succeed in this evaluation other than commercial software. Paid developers are contributing to the software that meeting cooperate interests at rapid pace, and smaller companies will work together until cooperate interests tear apart the software, or the funding eventually dry up and the software cease to exist, and the community will eventually fall apart. Good software usually comes down to a few individuals who work hard to enable the community to flourish. Many of the good software takes decades to develop from hobby projects. I will accept the voting result from IPMC, and I wish IPMC would use better human sense to enable future project to flourish. Hi Eric, Its good to see Jukka and Ant stepping up as mentors, may be that will give you Chukwa one more chance. From browsing through the private list and the general list, I see lots of philosophical arguments and how you will bring in your patches now that legal review at your employer is over. Ofcourse you mention new volunteers too. But so far I haven't seen an answer from you or other Chukwa PPMC what have you done previously to grow the community, what did not work and what is the change in plan now? I see multiple variants of this question has been asked quite a few times in the last couple of days and I am eager to see an answer from the Chukwa PPMC. Suresh Chris Douglas resigned from mentor position, therefore, Chukwa will need a new mentor, and one of Chukwa contributor Sourygna Luangsay volunteer to be the motivator for Chukwa development if Chukwa is voted to stay for another 6 months. regards, Eric On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:20
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 27, 2012, at 7:07 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: On Nov 27, 2012, at 6:35 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: ...URLs? My brain's too small to remember all these discussions ;-) It's on the private Chukwa list. How can I get these URLs?... Message-ID is fine in this case - sorry I thought you were referring to public discussions. There is a private conversation at 3/23/12 Time to put closure on this incubation There is a subsequent private conversation at 11/11/12 Time to put closure on this incubation I also forked the voting thread to a discussion as well to explain to the public community the reasons for the vote. Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 27, 2012, at 7:16 AM, ant elder wrote: Unless there are compelling reason to stop, i.e continuing breaches of basic ASF polices and principles, then where possible letting a poddling continue incubation or just graduate seems better to me than making them go elsewhere. Its not like a small slow problem is chewing up ASF resources, but i understand not everyone here agrees with my views on that. Wink is an example of poddling in similar circumstances and there we are about to have decided that graduation is better than retirement. Perhaps thats a better approach. I don't recall a graduation recommendation request from the Incubator has ever been rejected by the board so perhaps the Incubator is too conservative with graduation recommendations. Its interesting comparing Wink and Chukwa. From many perspectives Chukwa is much more active than Wink but we're about to graduate Wink and talking about retiring this one. I've not yet had a chance to go through all the Chukwa archives but unless i'm misunderstanding something Chukwa isn't just a lone coder, there have been several committers in the last months and while one is doing the majority of the commits many of those are actually applying patches from other people, so it looks like there are a bunch of people out there working on the project and we need to find ways of better integrating them into the poddling community. This is an interesting line of reasoning worth pursuing, IMO. If Chukwa and Wink are actually on a par with each other we should see if it make sense to apply the same reasoning about Wink to Chukwa. Are we implicitly having a policy change with podlings, if so, should we make it explicit? Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Hi Alan, In Wink, you voted +1, and in Chukwa, you voted -1. While the status are similar between Chukwa and Wink, but what is the logic behind your votes? In addition, Chukwa and Kafka are similar, and some Kafka design are borrowed from Chukwa. Does your relationship with Kafka influence your judgement being bias toward Chukwa? You called me a lone developer, while the jira list showed there are several others contributing as well. There are people submitting patches and open jira for discussions. You volunteered to work as mentor for Chukwa, but we only hear from you 4 times while being Chukwa mentor: 1. March 23, we welcome you to become Chukwa mentor. On the same day, you ask Chukwa to be retired. 2. June Report, Chris reviewed report, you gave a +1. 3. September 9, you said thank you to Bernd for follow up on granting new committers access. 4. Nov 16, you start on the private list on the same thread about retiring Chukwa. I am sorry, but I may be blunt. I think your action is harmful to Chukwa community rather than helping the community. In the Chukwa private mailing list, I also expressed my limitation to be contributing to Chukwa while I am working through logistics with my employer to get approval. While I did not write new code for Chukwa for the past half year, Chukwa continue to receive patches from the following individuals: Noel Duffy Jie Huang Sourygna Luangsay Abhijit Dhar Saisai Shao Ivy Tang Prakhar Srivastava Eric Speck Some patches are committed by Ari Rabkin. Contributions after 0.5 release can be tracked in CHANGES.txt. Chukwa is truly running as an open Apache project where patches are reviewed and discussed. Chukwa is used by Netflix, IBM, Intel, and several companies. If you search on LinkedIn, number of people that has Chukwa on their resume grown from 30 people in January to 55 now. The information are the same information that I provided on chukwa-private mailing list. Here is the quote from Chris: Eric, you recommend graduating Chukwa to be a TLP based on its activity relative to other incubator projects, engagement from independent contributors, adoption and investment in commercial offerings, and indirect measures of a growing interest in the project. Is that a fair summary? While Chukwa community is low key on participate political votes because the same rehash of closing the community has been on the focus since the original incubation proposal was written. If we are going to move forward, more time in incubation is not a realistic option. The only way is vote for graduation and avoid the vicious cycle of closing the project review. regards, Eric On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: On Nov 27, 2012, at 7:16 AM, ant elder wrote: Unless there are compelling reason to stop, i.e continuing breaches of basic ASF polices and principles, then where possible letting a poddling continue incubation or just graduate seems better to me than making them go elsewhere. Its not like a small slow problem is chewing up ASF resources, but i understand not everyone here agrees with my views on that. Wink is an example of poddling in similar circumstances and there we are about to have decided that graduation is better than retirement. Perhaps thats a better approach. I don't recall a graduation recommendation request from the Incubator has ever been rejected by the board so perhaps the Incubator is too conservative with graduation recommendations. Its interesting comparing Wink and Chukwa. From many perspectives Chukwa is much more active than Wink but we're about to graduate Wink and talking about retiring this one. I've not yet had a chance to go through all the Chukwa archives but unless i'm misunderstanding something Chukwa isn't just a lone coder, there have been several committers in the last months and while one is doing the majority of the commits many of those are actually applying patches from other people, so it looks like there are a bunch of people out there working on the project and we need to find ways of better integrating them into the poddling community. This is an interesting line of reasoning worth pursuing, IMO. If Chukwa and Wink are actually on a par with each other we should see if it make sense to apply the same reasoning about Wink to Chukwa. Are we implicitly having a policy change with podlings, if so, should we make it explicit? Regards, Alan
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Hi Suresh, Anymore time spend in incubator is not productive. Developers would feel threaten by the fact that the project is coming to the end and stop contributing. I think the only way forward is to vote for graduation or setup shop on github. IPMC can make good decisions when they are well informed, and collective wisdom can decide the proper votes base on facts. This will save IPMC and Chukwa PMC time and energy to make best possible decisions for Chukwa community and let Chukwa community focus on the goal of it's charter. regards, Eric On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 4:36 AM, Suresh Marru sma...@apache.org wrote: On Nov 27, 2012, at 3:08 AM, Eric Yang eric...@gmail.com wrote: Apache is a non-profit organization. If we restrict our thinking model to metrics of how many developers, and how many patches are committed in pre-defeined time limit. There is no software that is gong to succeed in this evaluation other than commercial software. Paid developers are contributing to the software that meeting cooperate interests at rapid pace, and smaller companies will work together until cooperate interests tear apart the software, or the funding eventually dry up and the software cease to exist, and the community will eventually fall apart. Good software usually comes down to a few individuals who work hard to enable the community to flourish. Many of the good software takes decades to develop from hobby projects. I will accept the voting result from IPMC, and I wish IPMC would use better human sense to enable future project to flourish. Hi Eric, Its good to see Jukka and Ant stepping up as mentors, may be that will give you Chukwa one more chance. From browsing through the private list and the general list, I see lots of philosophical arguments and how you will bring in your patches now that legal review at your employer is over. Ofcourse you mention new volunteers too. But so far I haven't seen an answer from you or other Chukwa PPMC what have you done previously to grow the community, what did not work and what is the change in plan now? I see multiple variants of this question has been asked quite a few times in the last couple of days and I am eager to see an answer from the Chukwa PPMC. Suresh Chris Douglas resigned from mentor position, therefore, Chukwa will need a new mentor, and one of Chukwa contributor Sourygna Luangsay volunteer to be the motivator for Chukwa development if Chukwa is voted to stay for another 6 months. regards, Eric On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:20 PM, Bernd Fondermann bernd.fonderm...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: As I mentioned in an earlier email, we did have this conversation seven months ago. We came to a consensus to give it another try. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. That doesn't take away the fact that there are still people who are clearly interested in continuing work on the project. Instead of telling the community to pick up their toys and leave, I'd much rather ask them to come up with a credible alternative. The failure of past attempts to grow the community does not necessarily mean that future attempts will also fail, so I'd give the community the benefit of doubt as long as there are new ideas and people willing to try them. If I understand correctly the problems in Chukwa are two-fold: 1) the community isn't diverse, i.e. there are only few people involved, and 2) the community isn't active, in that even the involved people don't have too many cycles to spend on the project. Thus I'd raise the following questions to Eric and others who want to keep Chukwa alive at the ASF: a) Is it reasonable to expect existing community members to become more active in near future? If yes, will such increased activity be sustainable over a longer period of time? Why? IIUC there was some recent legal progress that might help here. What would be the best way to measure the expected increase in activity? b) How do you expect to get more people involved in the project? What concrete actions will be taken to increase the chances of new contributors showing up? Why do you believe these things will work better than the mentioned earlier attempts at growing the community? Good ideas of concrete actions are for example cutting new releases, improving project documentation, presenting the project at various venues, simplifying the project build and initial setup, and giving more timely answers and feedback to new users and contributors (see also my observation from October [1]). How can we best tell whether such efforts are working? Coming up with good answers to such questions is not necessarily
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 27, 2012, at 9:41 PM, Eric Yang wrote: snip/ The various comparisons are distractions. Let's focus on Chukwa and what can be done. If we are going to move forward, more time in incubation is not a realistic option. The only way is vote for graduation and avoid the vicious cycle of closing the project review. If there's an Incubator policy change that I don't know about I'm happy to hear it and reconsider my personal opinion. If someone wants to change Incubator policy I'm happy to discuss it. Can you not see by my message below that I am not intransigent but am willing to discuss all manner of things? I would focus more on the Chukwa project and not spend so much time on comparing it to other projects nor making ugly innuendoes. Look around you. You are surrounded by a community who wants to help. Regards, Alan On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: On Nov 27, 2012, at 7:16 AM, ant elder wrote: Unless there are compelling reason to stop, i.e continuing breaches of basic ASF polices and principles, then where possible letting a poddling continue incubation or just graduate seems better to me than making them go elsewhere. Its not like a small slow problem is chewing up ASF resources, but i understand not everyone here agrees with my views on that. Wink is an example of poddling in similar circumstances and there we are about to have decided that graduation is better than retirement. Perhaps thats a better approach. I don't recall a graduation recommendation request from the Incubator has ever been rejected by the board so perhaps the Incubator is too conservative with graduation recommendations. Its interesting comparing Wink and Chukwa. From many perspectives Chukwa is much more active than Wink but we're about to graduate Wink and talking about retiring this one. I've not yet had a chance to go through all the Chukwa archives but unless i'm misunderstanding something Chukwa isn't just a lone coder, there have been several committers in the last months and while one is doing the majority of the commits many of those are actually applying patches from other people, so it looks like there are a bunch of people out there working on the project and we need to find ways of better integrating them into the poddling community. This is an interesting line of reasoning worth pursuing, IMO. If Chukwa and Wink are actually on a par with each other we should see if it make sense to apply the same reasoning about Wink to Chukwa. Are we implicitly having a policy change with podlings, if so, should we make it explicit? Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Continue the retirement vote, and see if it passes in IPMC. If it does, I will gladly setup shop in github. If it doesn't, Chukwa community should prepare for Chukwa 0.6.0 release, and start voting on Chukwa 0.6.0 release, and follow by vote for graduation. Content in Chukwa trunk contains a number of good features and fixes generated by the community. I really appreciate the support by Incubator community to make this possible. Does this sound like a plan? regards, Eric On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:00 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: On Nov 27, 2012, at 9:41 PM, Eric Yang wrote: snip/ The various comparisons are distractions. Let's focus on Chukwa and what can be done. If we are going to move forward, more time in incubation is not a realistic option. The only way is vote for graduation and avoid the vicious cycle of closing the project review. If there's an Incubator policy change that I don't know about I'm happy to hear it and reconsider my personal opinion. If someone wants to change Incubator policy I'm happy to discuss it. Can you not see by my message below that I am not intransigent but am willing to discuss all manner of things? I would focus more on the Chukwa project and not spend so much time on comparing it to other projects nor making ugly innuendoes. Look around you. You are surrounded by a community who wants to help. Regards, Alan On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: On Nov 27, 2012, at 7:16 AM, ant elder wrote: Unless there are compelling reason to stop, i.e continuing breaches of basic ASF polices and principles, then where possible letting a poddling continue incubation or just graduate seems better to me than making them go elsewhere. Its not like a small slow problem is chewing up ASF resources, but i understand not everyone here agrees with my views on that. Wink is an example of poddling in similar circumstances and there we are about to have decided that graduation is better than retirement. Perhaps thats a better approach. I don't recall a graduation recommendation request from the Incubator has ever been rejected by the board so perhaps the Incubator is too conservative with graduation recommendations. Its interesting comparing Wink and Chukwa. From many perspectives Chukwa is much more active than Wink but we're about to graduate Wink and talking about retiring this one. I've not yet had a chance to go through all the Chukwa archives but unless i'm misunderstanding something Chukwa isn't just a lone coder, there have been several committers in the last months and while one is doing the majority of the commits many of those are actually applying patches from other people, so it looks like there are a bunch of people out there working on the project and we need to find ways of better integrating them into the poddling community. This is an interesting line of reasoning worth pursuing, IMO. If Chukwa and Wink are actually on a par with each other we should see if it make sense to apply the same reasoning about Wink to Chukwa. Are we implicitly having a policy change with podlings, if so, should we make it explicit? Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:33 AM, Eric Yang eric...@gmail.com wrote: ...With respect to the voting result, but it leaves me puzzled that why should Chukwa be retired. When there are contributors, and there are activities for growth... Note that there's several -1s in the [VOTE] thread on general@incubator.a.o, based on the lack of consensus that we see in [1]. -Bertrand [1] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201211.mbox/%3c852ac9fe-f6a3-4a96-b0b9-653320e47...@toolazydogs.com%3E - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Actually there is activity. Only in September 2 new committers joined. Looking at SVN, there is activity too: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/chukwa/trunk/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/chukwa/ Unfortunately the most active committer - if not the only one - is Eric. For me (others may correct me) a successful incubator project is one which manages to build up a community around it. While it seems that Chukwa aims at it: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201209.mbox/%3CCAFk14gt_8bwOZ3=2bmmksjmpftovh2_s+ncrya3by9yo4hz...@mail.gmail.com%3E the project has not managed to get a momentum. On the other hand, I saw in the private archives that some legal restrictions have been resolved. Question: How does the Chukwa project want to build up a new community? Personally - if there is a plan and interest to make community work (however that looks like) - I would be open to leave Chukwa a little longer in incubation. Esp. because it seems that committers can now work more freely on it. Maybe we can make up some kind of deadline? Cheers Christian On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:33 AM, Eric Yang eric...@gmail.com wrote: Hi IPMC, For the past two years, Chukwa has been labelled as non-active project by mentors, and has been put on votes for retiring this project by mentor and IPMC. In this year's stats, Chukwa has more activities in comparison to Apache Wink in both mailing list traffic and resolved jiras. Yet Chukwa has been voted to discontinue by mentors, but Wink is voted to graduate by the same mentor. Here are the number of mails showed up in dev list between Apache Chukwa and Apache Wink: Chukka Nov 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201211.mbox/thread 46 Oct 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201210.mbox/thread 14 Sep 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201209.mbox/thread 51 Aug 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201208.mbox/thread 64 Jul 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201207.mbox/thread 82 Jun 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201206.mbox/thread 15 May 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201205.mbox/thread 24 Apr 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201204.mbox/thread 18 Mar 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201203.mbox/thread 71 Feb 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201202.mbox/thread 11 Jan 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201201.mbox/thread 60 Wink Nov 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201211.mbox/thread 18 Oct 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201210.mbox/thread 14 Sep 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201209.mbox/thread 2 Aug 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201208.mbox/thread 69 Jul 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201207.mbox/thread 5 May 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201205.mbox/thread 26 Apr 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201204.mbox/thread 24 Mar 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201203.mbox/thread 15 Feb 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201202.mbox/thread 21 Jan 2012http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/201201.mbox/thread 22 And Incubation status shows: ChukwaIncubator2010-07-14865Falsegroup-1TrueTruehttp://incubator.apache.org/projects/chukwa.html 2012-09-10760,2,413http://people.apache.org/committers-by-project.html#chukwa 4True https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/chukwa/Truehttps://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CHUKWA True http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/Truehttp://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-commits/ True http://incubator.apache.org/chukwa/Truehttp://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/incubator/chukwa/ True http://www.apache.org/dist/incubator/chukwa/KEYSTruehttp://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/incubator/chukwa/ WinkIncubator2009-05-271278Falsegroup-2TrueTruehttp://incubator.apache.org/projects/wink.html 2012-08-161010,4,616http://people.apache.org/committers-by-project.html#wink 3True https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/winkTruehttps://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/wink True http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-dev/Truehttp://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wink-commits/ True http://incubator.apache.org/wink/Truehttp://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/incubator/wink/ True
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 26, 2012, at 12:57 AM, Christian Grobmeier wrote: Actually there is activity. Only in September 2 new committers joined. Looking at SVN, there is activity too: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/chukwa/trunk/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/chukwa/ Unfortunately the most active committer - if not the only one - is Eric. For me (others may correct me) a successful incubator project is one which manages to build up a community around it. While it seems that Chukwa aims at it: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201209.mbox/%3CCAFk14gt_8bwOZ3=2bmmksjmpftovh2_s+ncrya3by9yo4hz...@mail.gmail.com%3E the project has not managed to get a momentum. On the other hand, I saw in the private archives that some legal restrictions have been resolved. Question: How does the Chukwa project want to build up a new community? Personally - if there is a plan and interest to make community work (however that looks like) - I would be open to leave Chukwa a little longer in incubation. Esp. because it seems that committers can now work more freely on it. Maybe we can make up some kind of deadline? Seven months ago we had this same discussion when I joined as a mentor. There was not a lot of activity other than Eric and I raised concerns about maybe it was time to retire the project. A variety of excuses were offered up and it was decided to wait a while and hope that the community activity would grow. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. IMO, not much changed. The flurry of activity is from Eric every time a discussion about retirement arises. As for the now that committers can work more freely on it is not exactly clear. My understanding is that there were some patches developed at IBM and those patches are now going through legal. I tried to dig deeper into what exactly was being held up and all I received was equivocation. Even by the PPMC's comments they obliquely acknowledge that there's not much activity and expressed an interested in simply keeping it around with the hopes that something would happen; there were no concrete ideas or plans on how to grow the community because, by their own admission, no one has the time to work much on the project. I replied To be sure, the infrastructure and administrative costs are negligible. So, we don't need to worry on that account. However, the ASF Incubator is not a place where you can hang your shingle up and hope that someday someone will wander by and be interested. Chukwa has been in the Incubator for years now. Maybe that's what we want the Incubator to be. If that's the case then let's make this new policy explicit. Until then, I will follow my understanding that a project cannot just simply park itself in the Incubator hoping for the party to arrive. Regards, Alan
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 25, 2012, at 7:33 PM, Eric Yang wrote: Hi IPMC, For the past two years, Chukwa has been labelled as non-active project by mentors, and has been put on votes for retiring this project by mentor and IPMC. In this year's stats, Chukwa has more activities in comparison to Apache Wink in both mailing list traffic and resolved jiras. Yet Chukwa has been voted to discontinue by mentors, but Wink is voted to graduate by the same mentor. Here are the number of mails showed up in dev list between Apache Chukwa and Apache Wink: Since I am the mentor that started the retirement vote on the podling I will explain my perspective. What it comes down to is actual diverse activity. For me, the overwhelming bulk of the work for Chukwa was being done by one person. While looking at the raw numbers the two projects seem similar, if you scrub the threads where we discuss whether or not to retire Chukwa and also look at who's doing the actual work, it seems to me that the two projects are not exactly the same. Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
I wonder which steps were taken by mentors, community and pmc to foster a community. I want to learn something from this case. Thanks. 26.11.2012 18:55 пользователь Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com написал: On Nov 25, 2012, at 7:33 PM, Eric Yang wrote: Hi IPMC, For the past two years, Chukwa has been labelled as non-active project by mentors, and has been put on votes for retiring this project by mentor and IPMC. In this year's stats, Chukwa has more activities in comparison to Apache Wink in both mailing list traffic and resolved jiras. Yet Chukwa has been voted to discontinue by mentors, but Wink is voted to graduate by the same mentor. Here are the number of mails showed up in dev list between Apache Chukwa and Apache Wink: Since I am the mentor that started the retirement vote on the podling I will explain my perspective. What it comes down to is actual diverse activity. For me, the overwhelming bulk of the work for Chukwa was being done by one person. While looking at the raw numbers the two projects seem similar, if you scrub the threads where we discuss whether or not to retire Chukwa and also look at who's doing the actual work, it seems to me that the two projects are not exactly the same. Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 26, 2012, at 7:51 AM, Alexei Fedotov wrote: I wonder which steps were taken by mentors, community and pmc to foster a community. I want to learn something from this case. Thanks. When we had our first retirement discussion early this year it was the consensus that we would wait until the end of the year to see if anyone would show up. The reasons for waiting were not entirely clear to me but there was something about how the project was split off from Hadoop back in 2010. Anyway, Eric was enthusiastic at the time and so I personally figured, sure, let's give it some more time and see what happens. We also added a few more committers with the hopes of infusing new blood into the project. So, we waited for more than half a year and we added new committers. I know we don't have a dysfunctional PPMC or committership; the current set of members are great, just inactive. Now, if not a lot of people are interested in the project itself then it's hard to whip up enthusiasm for people to contribute. In previous podlings that I have mentored raising the specter of retirement has brought lurkers out from the background and incentivized them to step up and become active in the community. For Chukwa no such result occurred. So, what else can be done? We asked for plans or ideas from the PPMC and, as I mentioned in voting thread, the discussion with the mentors involved only one member of the PPMC. The other PPMC members were mute with the exception of one member who stated that he'd be ok with it being put into the attic and the project moving to GitHub. We could wait some more but we already did that and I don't think that it will be productive given that the project is basically flatlined. Regards, Alan
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 6:54 AM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: On Nov 25, 2012, at 7:33 PM, Eric Yang wrote: Hi IPMC, For the past two years, Chukwa has been labelled as non-active project by mentors, and has been put on votes for retiring this project by mentor and IPMC. In this year's stats, Chukwa has more activities in comparison to Apache Wink in both mailing list traffic and resolved jiras. Yet Chukwa has been voted to discontinue by mentors, but Wink is voted to graduate by the same mentor. Here are the number of mails showed up in dev list between Apache Chukwa and Apache Wink: Since I am the mentor that started the retirement vote on the podling I will explain my perspective. What it comes down to is actual diverse activity. For me, the overwhelming bulk of the work for Chukwa was being done by one person. While looking at the raw numbers the two projects seem similar, if you scrub the threads where we discuss whether or not to retire Chukwa and also look at who's doing the actual work, it seems to me that the two projects are not exactly the same. I went ahead and did just that. I read a bunch of the threads and the pattern is that one committer does (mostly small) stuff and the few others typically just say meh It should be emphasized that retirement != project-death-sentence. Chukwa might even do much better as a github project where new contributors can be groomed more aggressively than with an apache project.
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Alan, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 3:52 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: On Nov 26, 2012, at 12:57 AM, Christian Grobmeier wrote: Actually there is activity. Only in September 2 new committers joined. Looking at SVN, there is activity too: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/chukwa/trunk/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/chukwa/ Unfortunately the most active committer - if not the only one - is Eric. For me (others may correct me) a successful incubator project is one which manages to build up a community around it. While it seems that Chukwa aims at it: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-chukwa-dev/201209.mbox/%3CCAFk14gt_8bwOZ3=2bmmksjmpftovh2_s+ncrya3by9yo4hz...@mail.gmail.com%3E the project has not managed to get a momentum. On the other hand, I saw in the private archives that some legal restrictions have been resolved. Question: How does the Chukwa project want to build up a new community? Personally - if there is a plan and interest to make community work (however that looks like) - I would be open to leave Chukwa a little longer in incubation. Esp. because it seems that committers can now work more freely on it. Maybe we can make up some kind of deadline? Seven months ago we had this same discussion when I joined as a mentor. There was not a lot of activity other than Eric and I raised concerns about maybe it was time to retire the project. A variety of excuses were offered up and it was decided to wait a while and hope that the community activity would grow. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. IMO, not much changed. The flurry of activity is from Eric every time a discussion about retirement arises. As for the now that committers can work more freely on it is not exactly clear. My understanding is that there were some patches developed at IBM and those patches are now going through legal. I tried to dig deeper into what exactly was being held up and all I received was equivocation. Even by the PPMC's comments they obliquely acknowledge that there's not much activity and expressed an interested in simply keeping it around with the hopes that something would happen; there were no concrete ideas or plans on how to grow the community because, by their own admission, no one has the time to work much on the project. I replied To be sure, the infrastructure and administrative costs are negligible. So, we don't need to worry on that account. However, the ASF Incubator is not a place where you can hang your shingle up and hope that someday someone will wander by and be interested. Chukwa has been in the Incubator for years now. Maybe that's what we want the Incubator to be. If that's the case then let's make this new policy explicit. Until then, I will follow my understanding that a project cannot just simply park itself in the Incubator hoping for the party to arrive. Thank you for clarifying. It's good to read a summary of a Mentor. Actually I think you understand the Incubator as I do and what I have read in your mail it makes sense to end incubation. As Ted Dunning said: retiring != death. GitHub might make more sense. When the project got more community it can come try to come back to the incubator. Cheers Christian - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: Even by the PPMC's comments they obliquely acknowledge that there's not much activity and expressed an interested in simply keeping it around with the hopes that something would happen; there were no concrete ideas or plans on how to grow the community because, by their own admission, no one has the time to work much on the project. That lack of concrete plans is a good place to start. Anyone from the community who opposes retirement should take it up on themselves to provide such a concrete plan for example in time for next month's report. Just like the caster of a technical veto should come up with an alternative implementation. :-) As an example of how this can play out, see the way we asked Kitty to provide such a plan [1] when some members of the community opposed the idea of retirement. In Kitty nobody stood up to the task, so a few months later the final decision to retire the project was a pretty easy one to make. Another example with a different outcome is JSPWiki that had a similar discussion at the beginning of the year, and actually a few members of the community did start working through all the issues and have now produced their first Apache release and seem to be on a path towards graduation even though the project is still far below its past activity. [1] http://markmail.org/message/smhl3cxvrgq5cf22 BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 26, 2012, at 12:21 PM, Jukka Zitting wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: Even by the PPMC's comments they obliquely acknowledge that there's not much activity and expressed an interested in simply keeping it around with the hopes that something would happen; there were no concrete ideas or plans on how to grow the community because, by their own admission, no one has the time to work much on the project. That lack of concrete plans is a good place to start. Anyone from the community who opposes retirement should take it up on themselves to provide such a concrete plan for example in time for next month's report. Just like the caster of a technical veto should come up with an alternative implementation. :-) As I mentioned in an earlier email, we did have this conversation seven months ago. We came to a consensus to give it another try. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. The vote came after many discussions over the year. The Chukwa podling, which was started back in 2010, was given its second chance. Unless there's something glaring that was overlooked, I'm not prepared to change my mind about its retirement. Regards, Alan
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: As I mentioned in an earlier email, we did have this conversation seven months ago. We came to a consensus to give it another try. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. That doesn't take away the fact that there are still people who are clearly interested in continuing work on the project. Instead of telling the community to pick up their toys and leave, I'd much rather ask them to come up with a credible alternative. The failure of past attempts to grow the community does not necessarily mean that future attempts will also fail, so I'd give the community the benefit of doubt as long as there are new ideas and people willing to try them. If I understand correctly the problems in Chukwa are two-fold: 1) the community isn't diverse, i.e. there are only few people involved, and 2) the community isn't active, in that even the involved people don't have too many cycles to spend on the project. Thus I'd raise the following questions to Eric and others who want to keep Chukwa alive at the ASF: a) Is it reasonable to expect existing community members to become more active in near future? If yes, will such increased activity be sustainable over a longer period of time? Why? IIUC there was some recent legal progress that might help here. What would be the best way to measure the expected increase in activity? b) How do you expect to get more people involved in the project? What concrete actions will be taken to increase the chances of new contributors showing up? Why do you believe these things will work better than the mentioned earlier attempts at growing the community? Good ideas of concrete actions are for example cutting new releases, improving project documentation, presenting the project at various venues, simplifying the project build and initial setup, and giving more timely answers and feedback to new users and contributors (see also my observation from October [1]). How can we best tell whether such efforts are working? Coming up with good answers to such questions is not necessarily easy (and it's fine if not all of them can yet be answered), but going through that effort should give us a good reason to continue the incubation of Chukwa at least for a few more months until we should start seeing some concrete and sustainable improvements in community activity and diversity. [1] http://markmail.org/message/tvs4yivabvrig7ia BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
+1 to Jukka's suggestion here. The world isn't going to end if we give them another month, and beyond that, it will give someone besides Eric the opportunity to help cruft the plan (hopefully 2 people besides Eric, since that would mean 3 active peeps in the community). If that plan can't be achieved in a month, I'm +1 to retire. Cheers, Chris On Nov 26, 2012, at 3:21 PM, Jukka Zitting wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: Even by the PPMC's comments they obliquely acknowledge that there's not much activity and expressed an interested in simply keeping it around with the hopes that something would happen; there were no concrete ideas or plans on how to grow the community because, by their own admission, no one has the time to work much on the project. That lack of concrete plans is a good place to start. Anyone from the community who opposes retirement should take it up on themselves to provide such a concrete plan for example in time for next month's report. Just like the caster of a technical veto should come up with an alternative implementation. :-) As an example of how this can play out, see the way we asked Kitty to provide such a plan [1] when some members of the community opposed the idea of retirement. In Kitty nobody stood up to the task, so a few months later the final decision to retire the project was a pretty easy one to make. Another example with a different outcome is JSPWiki that had a similar discussion at the beginning of the year, and actually a few members of the community did start working through all the issues and have now produced their first Apache release and seem to be on a path towards graduation even though the project is still far below its past activity. [1] http://markmail.org/message/smhl3cxvrgq5cf22 BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Nov 26, 2012, at 4:25 PM, Jukka Zitting wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: As I mentioned in an earlier email, we did have this conversation seven months ago. We came to a consensus to give it another try. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. That doesn't take away the fact that there are still people who are clearly interested in continuing work on the project. Instead of telling the community to pick up their toys and leave, I'd much rather ask them to come up with a credible alternative. The failure of past attempts to grow the community does not necessarily mean that future attempts will also fail, so I'd give the community the benefit of doubt as long as there are new ideas and people willing to try them. OT: I don't care for the telling the community to pick up their toys and leave characterization. Being a mentor is a fair amount of work. Even more work when one is carrying out what seems to be the right thing to do even when it's unpopular. We're definitely not taking the easy route here and remarks like yours makes things unnecessarily harder. If I understand correctly the problems in Chukwa are two-fold: 1) the community isn't diverse, i.e. there are only few people involved, and 2) the community isn't active, in that even the involved people don't have too many cycles to spend on the project. We're talking about one developer here. Not a few people. If others had chimed in it would probably be a different story. With that said I do think that you have some good questions below. Thus I'd raise the following questions to Eric and others who want to keep Chukwa alive at the ASF: a) Is it reasonable to expect existing community members to becomec vcevwoi more active in near future? If yes, will such increased activity be sustainable over a longer period of time? Why? IIUC there was some recent legal progress that might help here. What would be the best way to measure the expected increase in activity? b) How do you expect to get more people involved in the project? What concrete actions will be taken to increase the chances of new contributors showing up? Why do you believe these things will work better than the mentioned earlier attempts at growing the community? Good ideas of concrete actions are for example cutting new releases, improving project documentation, presenting the project at various venues, simplifying the project build and initial setup, and giving more timely answers and feedback to new users and contributors (see also my observation from October [1]). How can we best tell whether such efforts are working? Coming up with good answers to such questions is not necessarily easy (and it's fine if not all of them can yet be answered), but going through that effort should give us a good reason to continue the incubation of Chukwa at least for a few more months until we should start seeing some concrete and sustainable improvements in community activity and diversity. [1] http://markmail.org/message/tvs4yivabvrig7ia I too would love to hear answers to these questions. More importantly I'd like to also hear them from other PPMC members in addition to Eric. Regards, Alan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
If we decide to give the podling another chance I would prefer to give it another six months rather than just one month. I don't think that a lot can reasonably be accomplished in one month. I would also like to see some milestones set in those six months. If the milestones are met or not met then the decision at the end of six months will be less contentious. Thoughts? Regards, Alan On Nov 26, 2012, at 4:39 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) wrote: +1 to Jukka's suggestion here. The world isn't going to end if we give them another month, and beyond that, it will give someone besides Eric the opportunity to help cruft the plan (hopefully 2 people besides Eric, since that would mean 3 active peeps in the community). If that plan can't be achieved in a month, I'm +1 to retire. Cheers, Chris On Nov 26, 2012, at 3:21 PM, Jukka Zitting wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: Even by the PPMC's comments they obliquely acknowledge that there's not much activity and expressed an interested in simply keeping it around with the hopes that something would happen; there were no concrete ideas or plans on how to grow the community because, by their own admission, no one has the time to work much on the project. That lack of concrete plans is a good place to start. Anyone from the community who opposes retirement should take it up on themselves to provide such a concrete plan for example in time for next month's report. Just like the caster of a technical veto should come up with an alternative implementation. :-) As an example of how this can play out, see the way we asked Kitty to provide such a plan [1] when some members of the community opposed the idea of retirement. In Kitty nobody stood up to the task, so a few months later the final decision to retire the project was a pretty easy one to make. Another example with a different outcome is JSPWiki that had a similar discussion at the beginning of the year, and actually a few members of the community did start working through all the issues and have now produced their first Apache release and seem to be on a path towards graduation even though the project is still far below its past activity. [1] http://markmail.org/message/smhl3cxvrgq5cf22 BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Alan, +1 from me. Cheers, Chris On Nov 26, 2012, at 10:32 PM, Alan Cabrera wrote: If we decide to give the podling another chance I would prefer to give it another six months rather than just one month. I don't think that a lot can reasonably be accomplished in one month. I would also like to see some milestones set in those six months. If the milestones are met or not met then the decision at the end of six months will be less contentious. Thoughts? Regards, Alan On Nov 26, 2012, at 4:39 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) wrote: +1 to Jukka's suggestion here. The world isn't going to end if we give them another month, and beyond that, it will give someone besides Eric the opportunity to help cruft the plan (hopefully 2 people besides Eric, since that would mean 3 active peeps in the community). If that plan can't be achieved in a month, I'm +1 to retire. Cheers, Chris On Nov 26, 2012, at 3:21 PM, Jukka Zitting wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: Even by the PPMC's comments they obliquely acknowledge that there's not much activity and expressed an interested in simply keeping it around with the hopes that something would happen; there were no concrete ideas or plans on how to grow the community because, by their own admission, no one has the time to work much on the project. That lack of concrete plans is a good place to start. Anyone from the community who opposes retirement should take it up on themselves to provide such a concrete plan for example in time for next month's report. Just like the caster of a technical veto should come up with an alternative implementation. :-) As an example of how this can play out, see the way we asked Kitty to provide such a plan [1] when some members of the community opposed the idea of retirement. In Kitty nobody stood up to the task, so a few months later the final decision to retire the project was a pretty easy one to make. Another example with a different outcome is JSPWiki that had a similar discussion at the beginning of the year, and actually a few members of the community did start working through all the issues and have now produced their first Apache release and seem to be on a path towards graduation even though the project is still far below its past activity. [1] http://markmail.org/message/smhl3cxvrgq5cf22 BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: As I mentioned in an earlier email, we did have this conversation seven months ago. We came to a consensus to give it another try. We even added a few committers a bit early with the hopes that they would infuse the project with more energy. That doesn't take away the fact that there are still people who are clearly interested in continuing work on the project. Instead of telling the community to pick up their toys and leave, I'd much rather ask them to come up with a credible alternative. The failure of past attempts to grow the community does not necessarily mean that future attempts will also fail, so I'd give the community the benefit of doubt as long as there are new ideas and people willing to try them. If I understand correctly the problems in Chukwa are two-fold: 1) the community isn't diverse, i.e. there are only few people involved, and 2) the community isn't active, in that even the involved people don't have too many cycles to spend on the project. Thus I'd raise the following questions to Eric and others who want to keep Chukwa alive at the ASF: a) Is it reasonable to expect existing community members to become more active in near future? If yes, will such increased activity be sustainable over a longer period of time? Why? IIUC there was some recent legal progress that might help here. What would be the best way to measure the expected increase in activity? b) How do you expect to get more people involved in the project? What concrete actions will be taken to increase the chances of new contributors showing up? Why do you believe these things will work better than the mentioned earlier attempts at growing the community? Good ideas of concrete actions are for example cutting new releases, improving project documentation, presenting the project at various venues, simplifying the project build and initial setup, and giving more timely answers and feedback to new users and contributors (see also my observation from October [1]). How can we best tell whether such efforts are working? Coming up with good answers to such questions is not necessarily easy (and it's fine if not all of them can yet be answered), but going through that effort should give us a good reason to continue the incubation of Chukwa at least for a few more months until we should start seeing some concrete and sustainable improvements in community activity and diversity. This is exactly what we did for the last months (years, actually). Give it yet more time. Honestly, I don't understand why we should continue in this mode for another few months when it failed for the past years. Is this the extra-bonus IPMC time? The legal issues only made it more clear to me that and why this Incubation failed. The much I'd love to see Chukwa fly, this is getting ridiculous. Bernd - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
Re: What constitute a successful project?
Great to hear, one month seemed too short to accomplish so much. I'd be happy to volunteer as another mentor if some fresh eyes will help. ...ant On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 3:32 AM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: If we decide to give the podling another chance I would prefer to give it another six months rather than just one month. I don't think that a lot can reasonably be accomplished in one month. I would also like to see some milestones set in those six months. If the milestones are met or not met then the decision at the end of six months will be less contentious. Thoughts? Regards, Alan On Nov 26, 2012, at 4:39 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) wrote: +1 to Jukka's suggestion here. The world isn't going to end if we give them another month, and beyond that, it will give someone besides Eric the opportunity to help cruft the plan (hopefully 2 people besides Eric, since that would mean 3 active peeps in the community). If that plan can't be achieved in a month, I'm +1 to retire. Cheers, Chris On Nov 26, 2012, at 3:21 PM, Jukka Zitting wrote: Hi, On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Alan Cabrera l...@toolazydogs.com wrote: Even by the PPMC's comments they obliquely acknowledge that there's not much activity and expressed an interested in simply keeping it around with the hopes that something would happen; there were no concrete ideas or plans on how to grow the community because, by their own admission, no one has the time to work much on the project. That lack of concrete plans is a good place to start. Anyone from the community who opposes retirement should take it up on themselves to provide such a concrete plan for example in time for next month's report. Just like the caster of a technical veto should come up with an alternative implementation. :-) As an example of how this can play out, see the way we asked Kitty to provide such a plan [1] when some members of the community opposed the idea of retirement. In Kitty nobody stood up to the task, so a few months later the final decision to retire the project was a pretty easy one to make. Another example with a different outcome is JSPWiki that had a similar discussion at the beginning of the year, and actually a few members of the community did start working through all the issues and have now produced their first Apache release and seem to be on a path towards graduation even though the project is still far below its past activity. [1] http://markmail.org/message/smhl3cxvrgq5cf22 BR, Jukka Zitting - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org - To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
