On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Dennis Lundberg <denn...@apache.org> wrote:
> I've been one of the mentors of the NPanday podling since it began
> incubation. As time has passed I am now the only mentor left.
> Unfortunately I no longer have the time to mentor NPanday, and haven't
> had for the past 6-8 months. Better to step down and let in some new
> blood. So I hereby resign as mentor for the NPanday podling.
>
> Since this is my only involvement in the incubator I also resign from
> the incubator PMC.
Best wishes, Dennis. Thank you for your past contributions.
NPanday community,
I've been browsing through your list archives and there seem to be signs of
life, with participation from David Akehurst, Lars Corneliussen, Brett Porter,
and Christofer Dutz. We can't let a podling with no Mentors to oversee it
persist for very long, though -- someone from the IPMC needs to be persuaded
to sign up. The podling's best shot at recruiting someone is to demonstrate
through action that they are bound and determined to create a healthy Apache
community around their codebase. That's how VXQuery, another podling at a
crossroads six months ago, brought some people on board.
A good start would be to file a detailed status report next week. Ideally,
the report would tell us about your plan for the future the podling, but there
is probably not enough time to formulate such a plan between now and then.
Instead, please describe your options, what the decision making process will
be and who is taking part.
I see that the prospect of sending JIRA notifications to the dev list instead
of the commits list is under consideration. Though I dislike issue tracker
development much as Lars dislikes mailing lists ;) I think that's a good idea
in your case -- it's a common pattern around the ASF.
I also read that there's a fair amount of back-channel discussion happening
via Skype and so on. That's not uncommon[1], but let's be clear: if decisions
aren't being made on the dev list, you don't have open governance and you
don't have an Apache community. Furthermore, hiding your traffic hurts
participation and recruitment because it makes it seem like the project is
dead. Fixing that problem is very important.
Lastly, though I suspect you will reject it, I think you should evaluate
retirement as an option. Retirement is not what we plan for when a podling
enters incubation, but all software has a lifecycle and if the Incubator only
accepted projects guaranteed to graduate, Apache would be a less interesting
place. For what it's worth, two projects have voted to retire themselves
recently (Tashi, Provisionr), while another decided to redouble its efforts
(VXQuery). If nothing else, weighing retirement against a project reboot may
flush some more lurkers out of hiding or persuade one of the current
contributors to take the lead.
Marvin Humphrey
[1] Here's a message I sent to vxquery-dev about the same subject with many
links to other articles: http://s.apache.org/exA
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