[Tinyos-devel] Introducing Apache Labs

[Joe Polastre]

Very cool.  I think TinyOS would benefit from a similar structure
where "community is more important than code."  In TinyOS-land, this
means that any school or company that has commit access could request
a lab, and the lab can work on whatever it wants so long as a lazy
consensus is reached to create the lab.

Now, if only we had a *real* TinyOS server, we could actually do great
things like this.   There are a gazillion great random TinyOS project
ideas with nowhere to live, this encourages the community to share
these ideas openly.

"Every ASF committer can ask for one or more labs. The creation of the
lab requires a PMC lazy consensus vote (at least three +1 and no -1,
72 hours).
    If approved, the ASF committer will create the lab on his/her own
and register the lab's descriptor in the lab registry. The committer
that asks for the lab becomes known as that lab's PI (principal
investigator). The PI is the sole responsible for keeping their lab
descriptor up-to-date. Failure to do so can result in lab completion."

Best,
-Joe


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stefano Mazzocchi <stefano at apache.org>
Date: Nov 26, 2006 2:48 AM
Subject: Introducing Apache Labs
To: Apache Committers <committers at apache.org>


Dear ASF committers,


It is my pleasure and pride to announce the opening of the Apache Labs
project, the innovation laboratories for committers of the Apache
Software Foundation.

Established by the Apache Board in the Nov 2006 board meeting with
unanimous vote and with a PMC composed by a very healthy diversity of
interests and project affiliations, Apache Labs is a project aimed at
giving ASF committers (and them only!) a place to innovate and care
about their own software projects without the burden of community building.


                               - o -


The ASF is proud of its "Community is more important than code" motto,
but such a strong focus on something so hard to grow tends to alienate
innovative and creative minds that need peace, quiet and freedom to work
on some cool and off-the-wall software ideas they have.

We have observed, over the years, many ASF committers with new and
exciting ideas that would rather develop and test them within the
comfort of the Apache infrastructure and watched by her/his peers,
rather than doing so in some anonymous and socially diluted substrate
like Sourceforge or Google Code.

Unfortunately for them, the Apache Incubator was explicitly designed as
a filter, as a way to promote the evolution of the foundation and its
growth, but trying to reduce the chance of abuse and the chance of
creation of software without a healthy and diverse community around it.

Such an effort, however, strongly collides with the needs for innovative
(and already trusted) individuals to gather a few buddies and start a
cool new thing in a corner with low barrier to entry and low overall
social cost for failure (because as research shows, most efforts do fail).

The lack of an infrastructure for innovators designed with low barrier
for entry and high tolerance for failure, has increased tension inside
and outside the incubator, forcing committers to host their own projects
outside the foundation, thus strongly reducing their ability to gather
feedback and participation from other fellow committers and to seed new
communities.

Apache Labs was established precisely to provide such an innovation
infrastructure so that committers will hopefully keep their innovations
in the house, and, in doing so, generate new and exciting opportunities
for new incubator podlings.


                               - o -


For more information on the project, point your browser to:


   http://labs.apache.org/


and let me remind you that *every* ASF committer (also those
participating in incubating projects) are allowed to ask for a
topic-oriented lab (or more, if you wish), without discrimination of
purpose, medium or implementation technology.

For more information on how Apache Labs functions, make sure to read the
'bylaws' at


   http://labs.apache.org/bylaws.html


To participate, subscribe to the "labs at labs.apache.org" mailing list by
sendind an email to


   labs-subscribe at labs.apache.org


Hope to see you there.


On behalf of the Apache Labs PMC,

--
Stefano Mazzocchi
Vice President, Apache Labs