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Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 00:05:43 +0200
From: Leo Simons <mail@leosimons.com>
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To: general@incubator.apache.org
Subject: The Incubator and Infrastructure
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Hi gang!

For people with no time to read any further: if you're, as a committer,
relatively new to apache, you should subscribe to infrastructure _at_
apache _dot_ org using your @apache.org e-mail address and spend some
time reading http://www.apache.org/dev/.

---

Here's an infra@-related rant for y'all. Best intentions, of course!

New projects entering incubation and projects graduating from incubation
are a large part of the workload for the apache infrastructure team.
They cause a stream of account requests, mailing list creation&move
requests, website creation and move requests, jira-related requests,
svn-related requests, and much more. Indirectly, incubation of new
projects leads to more FAQs and Frequently Made Mistakes since many new
people are brought in.

The infrastructure team does not have the manpower neccessary to educate
all these new people and new projects about the (ever-changing)
infrastructure policies and procedure (that's an understatement, infra@
is drowning in work). I would like to see the incubator PMC (not per se
in its role as PMC, just the people around here) take a larger
responsibility there.

I'd like to see everyone who is mentoring a project subscribed to
infrastructure _at_ apache _dot_ org, and similarly I'd like to see at
least a few people from every project undergoing incubation around on
that list. By the time a project graduates, its developers should be
aware of how infrastructure stuff works (or doesn't work!) around here.

I'd like to see some info from this message make it onto the incubator
website, but I'd also like to see very concrete infrastructure-related
documentation ("Here's how you request a new mailing list") to get off
of the incubator website (it needs to be on the infra@ website where the
infra team will see it and on sunny days keep it up-to-date).

(...)

A concrete, recent example of a workflow issue -- ideally it is mentors
that are requesting accounts on behalf of the incubator PMC using a
properly filled out template. Having new people (non-committers)
requesting their own accounts without following due dilligence or
notifying the proper PMC is not OK ("Hi I'm John Doe and I'd like an
account for project X as I was voted in" does not make sense to root@!),
and I think its up to the incubator to drive home that fact.

Similarly, many new people coming to the ASF are not too familiar with
the disorganised and decentralized nature of our "support" facilities,
and adjusting to that mind set (*you* keep track of *your* requests,
things *do* fall through the cracks; you *need* to make every effort to
save time of the volunteer handling your request) is something that I
think the incubator should work on.

Finally, new project communities need to "get" more than they seem to do
now on average, that our infrastructure is run by volunteers and that
basically they should do a "fair share" of the infrastructural work. In
other words, we want (nay need!) some of the new people that come into
apache to stick around as infrastructure volunteers.

thanks for reading all the way to the bottom!


happy incubating,


- Leo

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