Status

PROPOSED 

Blocking
Outcome
Minutes Link

Overview of Proposal

During the 2020 Member Summit a proposal that surfaced and gained quite a bit of support was to investigate the possibility of moving away from the current approach based on the binary Incubation/Active status in favor of a maturity rating system where various items could be measured with a level of completion as a percentage.

This is not an entirely new idea as we've discussed something like that in the past, Hart I think first came up with the idea of some kind of badging mechanism that could be displayed on the website, giving the reader the info to judge on the maturity of a project by themselves rather than trying to encompass all the different dimensions at play into a single metric.

As we know, several projects are stuck in Incubation due to a lack of diversity and the current rating system doesn't provide for a way to communicate that two projects in Incubation might be very different with regard to activity level, size of user community, etc. A finer grained rating system would address this problem.

Formal Proposal(s)

Danno has put together a proposal that is being discussed. All comments welcome:

Project Badging Proposal

Action Items

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Reviewed By


8 Comments

  1. Danno Ferrin

    I think the fundamental issue is one-size-fits-all one-and-done lifecycle stages don't fully communicate the nuances of how each project is evolving and what their current status is very well.  Badging (possibly with multiple levels for key badges) and renewal of those badges I think is a good path forward.

  2. Arnaud J Le Hors

    Important note: This proposal will need to be fleshed out. I created this page to keep track of the issue.

    All input on what the formal proposal might look like is welcome. Thanks.

  3. Arun S M

    This is a big topic for discussion. The badging criteria could cover a wide range of topics that is an indication of how active a project is. The size or the lifecycle of a project doesn't matter for earning these badges. For example, the common topics would look like

    • This project has XX% adherence to the best CI practices Hyperledger has defined.
    • This project has maintainers/contributor diversity from (1, 2, 3, 5, 8 ..) number of organizations (Each stage representing something like color code?).
    • This project had XYZ number of releases in the last 1 year.

    Note: This is not a list of items to be considered as formal/final proposal. This list is indicative only.

    This is a good place for WG/Task Force involvement. They can look into current projects and retrospectively listen to recent projects that earned active status from the incubation. This task force can also take survey/feedback from the community (the user community which is using Hyperledger project/s) on what influenced their decision to use a Hyperledger project in their use case. It is more effective if the users of these projects are benefitted with the efforts put in by us (the developer community).

    On the latter part of the previous paragraph, I would request help from the Hyperledger staff. Is there an established process to get the such feedback from the users, do we have such information for the Hyperledger projects?

  4. Tracy Kuhrt

    Back in the day, I had started to develop the following in the hyperledger-community-management-tools lab: https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/hyperledger-community-management-tools/blob/master/project-reports/docs/requirements.md. I wonder if now that we have the LF analytics tool if there is something that we can do to use the information there.

  5. Lindsay Nuon

    I think there may also be an opportunity for the DCI WG to lean in here and provide some additional support to projects that are stuck in Incubation due to a lack of diversity and to work with the TSC to develop an alternative rating criteria. Diversity is intrinsically multifaceted and dynamic, very rarely is it something that can be achieved or not. Please do keep us posted as you all brainstorm possible solutions and begin to develop the proposal, happy to help in any way we can. 

  6. Arun S M

    Tracy Kuhrtthat's a good document, we should discuss on those points. Building on the Lindsay Nuon 's point, how to get a summary on what's causing those projects currently in incubation to be in incubation for long?

    1. Ry Jones

      We would need to ask the projects why they haven't applied

      1. Arun S M

        Ah! Not having to make the decision in a time boundary is to blame. We cannot come up with solutions if we don't know the problems (smile). On the time boundary for moving from incubation to active, I believe lack of incentive could be a major hindering. With the badging proposal it is expected to change the way we look at a project.