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Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:43:20 +0000
Message-ID: <f470f68e0911102343j456dabd1k3bc7760e8fc975a6@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: How to shorten the duration of incubation (Was: Insanity...)
From: Robert Burrell Donkin <robertburrelldonkin@gmail.com>
To: general@incubator.apache.org
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On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 6:08 AM, Niclas Hedhman <niclas@hedhman.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 12:56 AM, Jukka Zitting <jukka.zitting@gmail.com>=
 wrote:

<snip>

>> I personally think that the exit criteria are good as they are (in
>> hindsight, Abdera is a good example of a project that graduated with
>> barely enough diversity of active committers), so if we do want to
>> make the Incubator "work faster" my suggestion would be to start by
>> raising our entry criteria. One way to do that would be to start
>> requiring the three mentors to show higher levels of personal
>> commitment than what we currently ask for.
>
> And would Subversion qualify ?? =A0Just kidding...
>
> We could do both #1 and #2 ... and then there might be a bunch of
> 'stale' ones that we retire. And with a smaller number of incubating
> projects, there should be more time for mentors on each one,
> addressing your #3.

my experience tells me that it's hard to guess which projects are
going to struggle. so tightening the entry criteria may prevent
community led projects being admitted without an improvement in
incubator throughput.

i'm not sure that loosening the entry criteria is a good idea either:
they give corporations incentives to play our game our way. if
graduation came to be seen as less difficult then there would be less
incentive for corporations to invest in community building in the
incubator.

IMHO the main issue is that now the process works fine for large
closed source donations (which covers the majority of podlings), the
IPMC has stopped developing the process

IMHO the next logical step is to break down graduation into a track
with several modular votes based on the criteria the IPMC has
developed for graduation. this should give a more finely grained idea
of where a podling is and would allow immediate approval of steps for
some podlings. for example, AIUI subversion already uses open
development so that could be approved right away (whereas this is
usually the most difficult criterion for podlings which a start as
close source projects).

releases are a good example. the auditing that is done when the first
release is presented could be done as three steps of the track
(license audit, source audit and artifact audit). only once all steps
were complete would a podling to allowed to submit a release for
official IPMC approval.

using a track would allow a more linear progression. at the moment,
there's a lot of work setting up the podling and getting things
moving. getting release approval and passing community is difficult so
most podlings drift along for quite a while once the initial effort is
over. breaking down these big, difficult tasks into a number of
smaller ones may make them more approachable.

- robert

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