Thanks for putting this together so clearly, Richard. I'm in favor of the move and the migration path being well-established makes this a low-risk change. The GitHub Discussions idea for the user list is interesting too. Worth trying!
+1 from me. Best, Atita On Wed, Mar 25, 2026 at 9:16 AM Richard Zowalla <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > I'd like to start a discussion about migrating our issue tracker from Jira > to GitHub Issues, as several other ASF projects have already done > successfully (Maven, Storm, Arrow, Lucene, and others). > The main benefits I see: > Contributors no longer need to create a Jira account to file a bug or > feature request, which alone can make a noticeable difference in > participation. GitHub's "good first issue" labelling is widely used and > well-known, making it easier to attract new contributors and widen our > community. > On top of that, enabling GitHub Discussions could replace our current user > mailing list, which has been fairly quiet for a while. Mailing lists are > showing their age as a communication channel, and many people today are > simply more comfortable engaging in a web-based forum style. GitHub > Discussions would meet users where they already are, potentially breathing > new life into community interaction around OpenNLP. > The migration path is well established: INFRA can migrate all existing and > closed Jira issues automatically to GitHub, as has been done for Maven, > Storm, Arrow, Lucene, and others, so we would not lose any history. > Regarding ASF compliance: archiving requirements are fully covered, as > everything can be mirrored to the appropriate mailing lists via .asf.yml > One thing worth acknowledging: moving to GitHub Issues does mean leaving > ASF-controlled infrastructure and depending on Microsoft. However, given > that ASF is already planning to migrate Jira to Atlassian Cloud, we would > be leaving ASF's own infra (for issue tracking) either way, so this concern > seems largely moot. > I'm not aware of any blockers, but I'd love to hear thoughts, concerns, or > prior experiences and start a discussion on it. > Gruß > Richard >
