Hello Apache VCL dev community, Back in December, I started a thread for the discussion of that month's board report. In that thread, I brought up concerns I had regarding the state of the development community's health. Please review the thread: http://markmail.org/message/3oz7rhy5fyv57nxt
Please also review the board report that was submitted: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/VCL/2015-12-16+Apache+VCL+Board+Report We have another board report coming up in March. There is a tool that project chairs use to help prepare the report which gathers some information and comes up with a project "health score". For Apache VCL, it displays the following: > Apache VCL: Unhealthy > Health score: -0.20 > Score note: Less than one email per day to all MLs combined in the past > quarter (-1.00) > Score note: No new members added to the LDAP committee group for more than > 2 years (-2.00) > Score note: No new committers invited for more than a year (-1.00) There are several indicators one could consider to gauge health of a project. List traffic is one. If you look at the graph at http://vcl.markmail.org/, you can see traffic has been markedly lower in recent months. This includes messages sent to the user, dev, and commits lists. If looks even worse if you look at user list traffic alone: http://vcl.markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Auser Another indicator is whether or not the number of committers and PMC members increases. This has proven to be difficult for VCL. As I think Josh correctly pointed out in the thread referenced above, the nature of VCL and its predominant audience (higher ed) may be factors which have made it difficult to attract new developers who make consistent contributions. I personally do not feel that regularly increasing the number of committers says a whole lot about the health of the project. A project can very healthy with a stable and small number of committers as long as they are regularly contributing. That said, the last time we added a committer was over 2 years ago and I don't know of any prospects. Regardless of how heavily you weight this indicator, it doesn't look good. In the past, some have approached these issues by thinking "hey, let's just try to find some more committers." This hasn't worked. We need a new and better approach if this project is to remain viable. We could start by working on areas we have direct control over and improving the ancillary details related to the project. Below are some ideas I can think of: 1. Increase involvement from existing committers In the thread from December, I was hoping to gauge people's concern and elicit thoughts and ideas from others. Unfortunately, only two people responded and no ideas were shared regarding how to improve the community. Based on the counts from Subversion and http://vcl.markmail.org/, here is the total number of messages sent and commits made from the project's current committers from 1/1/2015 until last week (I started typing this up a while ago): Comitter Messages Message Percent Commits Commit Percent Josh Thompson 542 49% 129 46% Andy Kurth 414 38% 124 44% Aaron Peeler 107 10% 18 6% Aaron Coburn 14 1% 0 0% Dmitri Chebotarov 14 1% 4 1% Young-Hyun Oh 7 1% 4 1% James O'Dell 0 0% 0 0% David Hutchins 0 0% 0 0% There are some threads such as this one and release discussions that I feel all committers should participate in. By participate, I mean more than simply replying "+1" or "good point, I agree". Increasing participation from committers may also have a snowball effect for others lurking on the lists and new subscribers. People may be more inclined to participate if the threads if they appear to be a more of a community discussion (which they all are) rather two people communicating back and forth. I think we need to come to an understanding regarding what is expected of committers. We also need to figure out how to address situations where committers are not participating. 2. Documentation Before someone could ever make development contributions to the project, they would need to be able to install VCL and have a good understanding of it. This isn't easy because the documentation is poor. If someone does gain a solid understanding of administering VCL and could potentially contribute back, our development documentation doesn't provide much information about where to get started or about the inner workings. Improving our documentation will help increase the adoption of VCL and also make it easier for people to contribute. 3. Vision & Roadmap In order to get voluntary development contributions, a project has to be appealing to developers. In order to be appealing, they have to know where it's going. Wherever that is, it needs to be interesting and useful. We don't have much of a roadmap or a vision of how VCL will look in the future. We should define and communicate a roadmap and vision. Starting with these points and hopefully others share more ideas, we may be able to make the project more appealing and improve its health. I'm not willing to do this alone, and it wouldn't be in accordance with "the Apache way" for Josh Thompson and I to do this alone. We both work for the same organization and organizational diversity is something we need to consider as well. If there simply isn't interest by others in sharing ideas and contributing, that's fine. However, if that's the case we will need to have a frank discussion about the future of the project and its relationship with Apache. Thank You, Andy
