Hi everyone, With all the progress we’ve had recently in Apache Beam, I think it is time we start the discussion about graduation as a new top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation.
Graduation means we are a self-sustaining and self-governing community, and ready to be a full participant in the Apache Software Foundation. It does not imply that our community growth is complete or that a particular level of technical maturity has been reached, rather that we are on a solid trajectory in those areas. After graduation, we will still periodically report to, and be overseen by, the ASF Board to ensure continued growth of a healthy community. Graduation is an important milestone for the project. It is also key to further grow the user community: many users (incorrectly) see incubation as a sign of instability and are much less likely to consider us for a production use. A way to think about graduation readiness is through the Apache Maturity Model [1]. I think we clearly satisfy all the requirements [2]. It is probably worth emphasizing the recent community growth: over each of the past three months, no single organization contributing to Beam has had more than ~50% of the unique contributors per month [2, see assumptions]. That’s a great statistic that shows how much we’ve grown our diversity! Process-wise, graduation consists of drafting a board resolution, which needs to identify the full Project Management Committee, and getting it approved by the community, the Incubator, and the Board. Within the Beam community, most of these discussions and votes have to be on the private@ mailing list, but, as usual, we’ll try to keep dev@ updated as much as possible. With that in mind, let’s use this discussion on dev@ for two things: * Collect additional data points on our progress that we may want to present to the Incubator as a part of the proposal to accept our graduation. * Determine whether the community supports graduation. Please reply +1/-1 with any additional comments, as appropriate. I’d encourage everyone to participate -- regardless whether you are an occasional visitor or have a specific role in the project -- we’d love to hear your perspective. Data points so far: * Project’s maturity self-assessment [2]. * 1500 pull requests in incubation, which makes us one of the most active project across all of ASF on this metric. * 3 releases, each driven by a different release manager. * 120+ individual contributors. * 3 new committers added, 2 of which aren’t from the largest organization. * 1027 issues created, 515 resolved. * 442 dev@ emails in October alone, sent by 51 individuals. * 50 user@ emails in the last 30 days, sent by 22 individuals. Thanks! Davor [1] http://community.apache.org/apache-way/apache-project- maturity-model.html [2] http://beam.incubator.apache.org/contribute/maturity-model/
