Resources for attracting a crowd

[John Casey <jd...@commonjava.org>]

Hi all,

I've been working on a project for 4-5 years now which I think would make a good Apache project, at least in terms of it being valuable, high-quality software. We're using it internally for our production systems at work, but the code is open (hosted on GitHub). Our process to date has been somewhat lacking (starting out as a 1-man project, now up to 3-4 regular contributors). The project is called Indy (https://github.com/Commonjava/indy).

I'm going through the incubator proposal template, and it seems like we could make a fairly compelling (IMHO) argument for acceptance. I've thought this for some time now...BUT:

With my history working in and promoting the Maven community in the past, I'm hesitant to say that I can give Indy the exposure necessary to attract a really thriving, diverse community. This is not a strong area for me personally, as talking about myself and my work doesn't come naturally. Also, I've got a lot of existing commitments in life, many of which revolve around Indy at work, but which don't leave a lot of room for doing extra promotion work.

I saw the thread about creating non-coding functional "centers" inside of Apache to provide a recognition path for non-coding contributions, and I think that's an incredibly cool idea. It got me wondering if we have anything in the Incubator that can help with the community-building part, for projects who have a more, well, introverted development team.

Does the Incubator have some facility or capability to help project teams attract a broader community?

I believe in the quality and value of Indy, but I'm not sure I myself have all the talents necessary to give it the long life it deserves.

Thanks,

-john

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Re: Resources for attracting a crowd

[John Casey <jd...@pobox.com>]

Responses inline.

Thanks,
-j

On Tue, Oct 9, 2018, at 3:13 AM, Justin Mclean wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > I've been working on a project for 4-5 years now which I think would make a good Apache project, at least in terms of it being valuable, high-quality software. We're using it internally for our production systems at work, but the code is open (hosted on GitHub). Our process to date has been somewhat lacking (starting out as a 1-man project, now up to 3-4 regular contributors). The project is called Indy (https://github.com/Commonjava/indy).
> 
> The project seems small, but you have managed to grow it and have 
> contributors so congratulations. How large is your user base? Is there 
> potential for users to become committers in the project?

We have a pretty small user base inside Red Hat, mainly concentrated on a single deployment. Outside the company, I really can't say, except that we don't see a lot of traffic on the GitHub site (PRs are mainly people engaged in supporting that internal deployment, some of them hacking from other teams). Our internal exposure is growing as Indy learns to do things like cache/track content downloaded during a build from arbitrary upstream SSL servers. It looks like our install base will be going up, as well as internal users.

But I haven't tried to talk about Indy publicly at all, except for the occasional oblique reference to it while discussing other things.

> 
> > With my history working in and promoting the Maven community in the past, I'm hesitant to say that I can give Indy the exposure necessary to attract a really thriving, diverse community. This is not a strong area for me personally, as talking about myself and my work doesn't come naturally. Also, I've got a lot of existing commitments in life, many of which revolve around Indy at work, but which don't leave a lot of room for doing extra promotion work.
> 
> There's more than one way to promote a project, but it can be a lot of 
> hard work and time and effort. Another Apache project I’m involved in, 
> is seeing growth after a year of talking to a lot of people, speaking at 
> conferences, writing articles and q whole lot of other work. Can any of 
> the other contributors help you in promotion?

As it stands now, the other contributors would probably be interested in promoting Indy at local JUGs and such (as am I), but will probably have limited ability to get on the conference circuit.

> 
> > Does the Incubator have some facility or capability to help project teams attract a broader community?
> 
> Not explicitly, but often being part of the Apache ecosystem and 
> interacting with other Apache projects can get more people interested in 
> your project and become part of your community.  Are there any other 
> apache projects you see synergy with or that could integrate with your 
> project?

Fundamentally, Indy is intended as a means of organizing the sources of content used during builds and build-like activities. We have an ability to do more than that, but IMO the fit could become somewhat awkward the farther afield we go (from build systems).

Increasingly, as large enterprise integration and CD-oriented projects start offering automated builds of things like Maven projects during their runtime workflows, it seems like building Indy into the mix would offer a natural way to insulate from network failures outside the bounds of the immediate environment. We dabbled with a trimmed-back version of Indy specifically targeted at embedding, and it wouldn't be hard to open up that line of work again if someone had an interest.

I would think that build tools like Maven, Ant, Gradle, PyPI, NPM/Yarn/etc. and things like that would benefit from Indy. Obviously, not all of those are Apache projects, but I'm sure you see what I mean. We refactored the core of Indy to facilitate support for different package types (not just Maven repositories) about a year ago, but we haven't done too much with it yet beyond NPM proxying / hosting support. I'd say we haven't yet proven the Rule of Three for interfaces yet, but we're close.

> 
> Thanks,
> Justin
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Re: Resources for attracting a crowd

[Justin Mclean <ju...@classsoftware.com>]

Hi,

> I've been working on a project for 4-5 years now which I think would make a good Apache project, at least in terms of it being valuable, high-quality software. We're using it internally for our production systems at work, but the code is open (hosted on GitHub). Our process to date has been somewhat lacking (starting out as a 1-man project, now up to 3-4 regular contributors). The project is called Indy (https://github.com/Commonjava/indy).

The project seems small, but you have managed to grow it and have contributors so congratulations. How large is your user base? Is there potential for users to become committers in the project?

> With my history working in and promoting the Maven community in the past, I'm hesitant to say that I can give Indy the exposure necessary to attract a really thriving, diverse community. This is not a strong area for me personally, as talking about myself and my work doesn't come naturally. Also, I've got a lot of existing commitments in life, many of which revolve around Indy at work, but which don't leave a lot of room for doing extra promotion work.

There's more than one way to promote a project, but it can be a lot of hard work and time and effort. Another Apache project I’m involved in, is seeing growth after a year of talking to a lot of people, speaking at conferences, writing articles and q whole lot of other work. Can any of the other contributors help you in promotion?

> Does the Incubator have some facility or capability to help project teams attract a broader community?

Not explicitly, but often being part of the Apache ecosystem and interacting with other Apache projects can get more people interested in your project and become part of your community.  Are there any other apache projects you see synergy with or that could integrate with your project?

Thanks,
Justin
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Re: Resources for attracting a crowd

[John Casey <jd...@pobox.com>]

Hi all,

Sorry it's taken me awhile to respond, but this past couple of weeks has served as a good reminder that those of us working on Indy probably don't have the time to devote to building a real community yet. As Shane pointed out, we haven't really even exercised the features available on GitHub for reaching out to a community. This is something I've had on the TODO list for awhile, along with CI improvements and documentation polishing. Unfortunately, I'm sure you all know where that stuff goes when production deployments break. 

I still think building a real community around Indy is a worthy goal, and it's something I'd like to pursue. I guess I'll shelve it for now and come back to it next year to see if things have slowed down a bit for us.

Thanks for your input.

-john

On Thu, Oct 11, 2018, at 4:14 AM, Shane Curcuru wrote:
> John Casey wrote on 10/8/18 1:33 PM:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I've been working on a project for 4-5 years now which I think would make a good Apache project, at least in terms of it being valuable, high-quality software. We're using it internally for our production systems at work, but the code is open (hosted on GitHub). Our process to date has been somewhat lacking (starting out as a 1-man project, now up to 3-4 regular contributors). The project is called Indy (https://github.com/Commonjava/indy).
> 
> Where's CONTRIBUTING.md?
> 
> -- 
> 
> - Shane
>   ASF Member & Comdev PMC
>   The Apache Software Foundation
> 
> P.S. The above is both a snarky and a serious comment.  The first step -
> besides coming here to ask, which is super-awesome!!! - is to make sure
> that the homepage for your project is *explicitly* welcoming of both new
> contributions and new committers.  I.e. not only do you want to see
> people submit patches, you welcome people suggesting new directions or
> adding new modules, and would be happy to add them to your maintainers.
> 
> Plus, as noted elsethread, ensure that all the rest of the bits of
> managing a project - issues, docs - are all at public URLs and have
> their own friendly "How to..." documentation right on the front page.
> 
> ProTip: Just publish your docs now (unless they're seriously wrong
> because they're out of date).  Perfection does not help community;
> pretty good stuff that needs some obvious fixes helps community.
> 
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Re: Resources for attracting a crowd

[Shane Curcuru <as...@shanecurcuru.org>]

John Casey wrote on 10/8/18 1:33 PM:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been working on a project for 4-5 years now which I think would make a good Apache project, at least in terms of it being valuable, high-quality software. We're using it internally for our production systems at work, but the code is open (hosted on GitHub). Our process to date has been somewhat lacking (starting out as a 1-man project, now up to 3-4 regular contributors). The project is called Indy (https://github.com/Commonjava/indy).

Where's CONTRIBUTING.md?

-- 

- Shane
  ASF Member & Comdev PMC
  The Apache Software Foundation

P.S. The above is both a snarky and a serious comment.  The first step -
besides coming here to ask, which is super-awesome!!! - is to make sure
that the homepage for your project is *explicitly* welcoming of both new
contributions and new committers.  I.e. not only do you want to see
people submit patches, you welcome people suggesting new directions or
adding new modules, and would be happy to add them to your maintainers.

Plus, as noted elsethread, ensure that all the rest of the bits of
managing a project - issues, docs - are all at public URLs and have
their own friendly "How to..." documentation right on the front page.

ProTip: Just publish your docs now (unless they're seriously wrong
because they're out of date).  Perfection does not help community;
pretty good stuff that needs some obvious fixes helps community.

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Re: Resources for attracting a crowd

[John Casey <jd...@pobox.com>]

Thanks Kevin,

I'd definitely say that Indy falls short of a truly welcoming project for new contributors, but that's mainly for the common failings of letting our user documentation fall out of date and failing to operate the entire development process out in the open. Initially we did pursue that, but the lack of wider community engagement - and lack of vision for how to increase that engagement given our contributors' constraints - led us to do the easy thing and fall back on Red Hat infrastructure to host those discussions.

Making it easy to bring people into this project is a priority for me, though. We have a large body of (slightly disorganized) developer / design documentation that I could publish, and there isn't much preventing us from transitioning our issue tracker into a public space...mainly just efficiency of the agile process we've been following.

I'd say that our minds are in the right place, and we try to help anyone who expresses interest in using or contributing to Indy, but the current contributors have pretty severely limited time/resources to evangelize.

Thanks,
-j

On Tue, Oct 9, 2018, at 2:46 AM, Kevin A. McGrail wrote:
> Hi John, our VP is on route to China at the moment but I would say this is
> not a strength of many developers but the concept of community over code is
> an important one that we would support you in building.
> 
> --
> Kevin A. McGrail
> VP Fundraising, Apache Software Foundation
> Chair Emeritus Apache SpamAssassin Project
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmcgrail - 703.798.0171
> 
> 
> On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 1:33 PM John Casey <jd...@commonjava.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I've been working on a project for 4-5 years now which I think would make
> > a good Apache project, at least in terms of it being valuable, high-quality
> > software. We're using it internally for our production systems at work, but
> > the code is open (hosted on GitHub). Our process to date has been somewhat
> > lacking (starting out as a 1-man project, now up to 3-4 regular
> > contributors). The project is called Indy (
> > https://github.com/Commonjava/indy).
> >
> > I'm going through the incubator proposal template, and it seems like we
> > could make a fairly compelling (IMHO) argument for acceptance. I've thought
> > this for some time now...BUT:
> >
> > With my history working in and promoting the Maven community in the past,
> > I'm hesitant to say that I can give Indy the exposure necessary to attract
> > a really thriving, diverse community. This is not a strong area for me
> > personally, as talking about myself and my work doesn't come naturally.
> > Also, I've got a lot of existing commitments in life, many of which revolve
> > around Indy at work, but which don't leave a lot of room for doing extra
> > promotion work.
> >
> > I saw the thread about creating non-coding functional "centers" inside of
> > Apache to provide a recognition path for non-coding contributions, and I
> > think that's an incredibly cool idea. It got me wondering if we have
> > anything in the Incubator that can help with the community-building part,
> > for projects who have a more, well, introverted development team.
> >
> > Does the Incubator have some facility or capability to help project teams
> > attract a broader community?
> >
> > I believe in the quality and value of Indy, but I'm not sure I myself have
> > all the talents necessary to give it the long life it deserves.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > -john
> >
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> > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@community.apache.org
> > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@community.apache.org
> >
> >

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Re: Resources for attracting a crowd

["Kevin A. McGrail" <km...@apache.org>]

Hi John, our VP is on route to China at the moment but I would say this is
not a strength of many developers but the concept of community over code is
an important one that we would support you in building.

--
Kevin A. McGrail
VP Fundraising, Apache Software Foundation
Chair Emeritus Apache SpamAssassin Project
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmcgrail - 703.798.0171


On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 1:33 PM John Casey <jd...@commonjava.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've been working on a project for 4-5 years now which I think would make
> a good Apache project, at least in terms of it being valuable, high-quality
> software. We're using it internally for our production systems at work, but
> the code is open (hosted on GitHub). Our process to date has been somewhat
> lacking (starting out as a 1-man project, now up to 3-4 regular
> contributors). The project is called Indy (
> https://github.com/Commonjava/indy).
>
> I'm going through the incubator proposal template, and it seems like we
> could make a fairly compelling (IMHO) argument for acceptance. I've thought
> this for some time now...BUT:
>
> With my history working in and promoting the Maven community in the past,
> I'm hesitant to say that I can give Indy the exposure necessary to attract
> a really thriving, diverse community. This is not a strong area for me
> personally, as talking about myself and my work doesn't come naturally.
> Also, I've got a lot of existing commitments in life, many of which revolve
> around Indy at work, but which don't leave a lot of room for doing extra
> promotion work.
>
> I saw the thread about creating non-coding functional "centers" inside of
> Apache to provide a recognition path for non-coding contributions, and I
> think that's an incredibly cool idea. It got me wondering if we have
> anything in the Incubator that can help with the community-building part,
> for projects who have a more, well, introverted development team.
>
> Does the Incubator have some facility or capability to help project teams
> attract a broader community?
>
> I believe in the quality and value of Indy, but I'm not sure I myself have
> all the talents necessary to give it the long life it deserves.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -john
>
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>