Re: GitHub organization discussed at FOSDEM

On Feb 20, 2015, at 10:54 PM, Hisham <h@hisham.hm> wrote:

So, the concrete proposal boiled down to this:

* We create an organization in GitHub (essentially a group account,
like http://github.com/keplerproject ) which will host some projects

* The criteria for hosting them in this org will be simple: it will
host modules being maintained by two or more maintainers. This way,
people can join, leave and the project keeps its continuity, without
people having to figure out which fork in GitHub is the maintained
one.

* If maintainers leave the project to the point that there's a single
remaining maintainer, the remaining one can ask for volunteers to join
in lua-l, and if no one comes up, the project is moved out of the org
and into the sole maintainer's account.

* This way, instead of a subjective selection of modules (some
maintained and some abandoned) like in Kepler, looking at the projects
in the org you'll have at least the guarantee that (a) they are not
abandoned, (b) there are at least two people who use/like/maintain
this project. (So it is to an extent a metric of curation, but a
concrete one.)

If I'm misrepresenting anything that was discussed in the BoF, please
do correct me! It's been weeks!

There are probably other practical details to decide (For example, how
long does it take until a project is abandoned? My suggestion is to do
a yearly review to check if maintainers are still involved/reachable.)

A couple other things that come to mind are:

* Should be be a distinction between the current maintainers/leaders and

those that are other contributors?

* Should this distinction be democratic (e.g., current maintainers/leaders

voted from and by the current contributors)?

* What mechanism will be in place to allow an interested person to become

involved in a particular project?

* Should the yearly review include reviewing how the project is attracting

and incorporating new contributors to it? I think this is important to

maintain and sustain a project.

And then we get to Pierre's questions:

1) How do you want to call this organization?

As I told Justin over lunch after the BoF meeting, this is probably
the hardest question. :) luateam is obviously taken by the Lua Team,
luausers was suggested in the BoF might be confusing with the
lua-users.org wiki... luacommunity? I like the sound of it.

Other potential names:

* Luaverse

* Lunaverse

* CLAN (Comprehensive Lua Archive Network - to steal an idea from Perl and other groups)

Chris Berardi