JA-SIG Incubation Process

Inspired by Apache, via Globus

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• The JA-SIG Incubation Process is wholistically the activities and mechanism whereby open source software projects are proposed, incubated, evaluated, progressed, and emerged from incubation
• The JA-SIG Incubation Working Group (JIWG) are the people who oversee this process
• The Incubation Mentor is a particular person assigned by the Incubation Working Group to shepherd the project through incubation.
• The JA-SIG Board leads JA-SIG, overseeing and supporting the Working Group and the process they execute
• Projects are the software subject to incubated, progressing from Candidate Project status through in-incubation Incubated Project status and ideally emerging as a fully-fledged Sponsored Project.

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• All code properly licensed
• No non-licensed or license-incompatible dependencies in the code base;
• Software license grant complete;
• Contributor License Agreements on file (both individual and corporate agreement);
• Copyright agreement in all source files
• Check of project name for trademark issues.
  * JS: trademark registration for project name help by JA-SIG

Meritocracy / Community

• Demonstrate an active and diverse development community. Preferably the list of original committers will have grown beyond the original set (and institution) in the proposal, but this is not a requirement.;
• Demonstrate that the project has a reasonable expectation for support in the future, for example, if any single contributor leaves the project continued support will exist;
• The above implies that new committers are admitted according to JA-SIG practices;
• A project steering committee has been created to oversee the project or the project committers and an existing steering commitee agree that an existing steering committee will steer the project.
• JA-SIG voting practices have been adopted and are standard practice ;Demonstrated ability to tolerate and resolve conflict within the community; practice
• The project can articulate instances of having weathered and resolved conflict. Good-natured and well-meaning disagreement of vision, requirements, and implementation are a reality of community source development. JA-SIG desires that incubated projects work through these "growing pains", as the software is developed and additional committers and adopters become involved, before emerging from incubation. Incubation provides an opportunity to face conflict with the assistance of an Incubation Mentor and the support of the Incubation Working Group. [ JS: this seems to too hard to quantify to be particularly useful ]
• Release plans are developed and executed in public by the community; committers
  • At least 1 one release has occurred during the Incubation process.
  • Engagement by the incubated community with the larger JA-SIG community [ JS: also unsure about this – how do we define engagement? It certainly seems reasonable to have basically independent projects ]

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• Infrastructure
  • SVN module has been created on JA-SIG server
  • Three required mailing list(s) lists have been used
  • Issue tracker is being used (JIRA)
  • Roadmap for project is present in Confluence
  • Project website is current
  • All non-sensitive (i.e. passwords, etc) information in the above tools is publicly accessible

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