On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 8:33 PM, Angela Cymbalak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > > > I'm concerned about the starting point from which to grow. > > > Apache committers have the Labs to get started and attract > > > a few interested people before coming to the Incubator. > > > A non-committer coming to the Incubator directly faces a > > > really steep learning curve. > > > > But that is why the incubator is here. There just needs to be enough > > interest in the podling to get accepted in the incubator. From there > > everything else follows. If there is no champion, sponsor or mentor > > available the podling won't start. And these conditions will only > > become available when someone has an interest in the podling. > > > > There is an extremely large learning curve but everyone starts somewhere > right? If you have people willing to show you the ropes (mentors) and > someone who believes in the project (a champion) and the drive to see > through your project, then that learning curve is made manageable. I just > don't have the guts to do what the JSecurity group did and outright ask to > recruit a Champion on the list. I am hoping that one of the members takes > an interest as I am working on things. Hi Angie, I'm not sure that it took 'guts' on our part - we were just following the "A Guide to Proposal Creation" to a T. The very first thing it says is to do is join this list, read the archives and podling/incubator documentation and then recruit a Champion that could help us through the process, even before we started on our proposal. So, we just started with step 1 and are waiting to see if we can get a Champion. If so, then we get to move on to step 2 ;) We're of course looking for mentors too, but we're just (perhaps naively) following the guide as requested. JSecurity might be a little different than your situation though, which isn't a bad thing of course, its just our paths might not overlap. Our codebase is almost 4 years old, with active development for the last 3 years from 5 current committers. We worked to build up a community over the last two years while continually improving the code and adding functionality. In the last 6 months, we've seen a large increase in activity, both from a coding standpoint as well as adoption rate, so we knew that we were on the verge of the 'next level' for the project. So, our next train of thought was "wow, things have really taken off the last year - we've got a good architecture and codebase that is used in many commercial and open source products, and we've got solid interest from the community. Lets see if we can take it as far as it can go." After good discussion among the committers, we decided that entry into the ASF would be symbiotic for both our community in fostering new adoption and better support as well as for the ASF in acquiring a project that is very different from anything they currently have and could prove to be quite useful in many ASF projects. We knew there can be a high barrier to entry in becoming an ASF project, so we wanted to make sure we 'had our stuff together' before trying. We feel we're at that point, at least enough to be a podling. I don't know anything about Caitrin or if it has similarities to our project, and I'm certainly not suggesting you follow our same path, but that was our history and thought process leading up to wanting to be a part of the ASF. I figured if that gave you any insight to what might be useful or informed potential mentors on this list, it would be worth writing about. Now we'd love to find our Champion :) Regards, and good luck with Caitrin, Les
