STATUS: proposal to the comdev PMC, currently discussed on our dev list, with a vote planned to accept it once the discussion finished.
This was initially named "Communities of Interests" but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_interest_group seems more appropriate. And the former name might be abbreviated CoI which we already use for "Conflict of Interest" in places.
As discussed in April 2021 we plan to offer the following services for Apache projects to create communities of interests around specific topic.
The motivation is a concrete request to do that for a healthcare community of interests.
We initially envision creating such SIGs for healthcare, osgi and iot but more will be created as requested.
What the Community Development PMC offers
- A homepage under https://community.apache.org/c/ ("c is for communities") sig/ named after your initiative
- A mailing list with the same name @communityIf desired, a
<SIG>@community.apache.org
mailing list, archived at lists.apache.org, where SIG is the same name as your homepage.
Oversight, and what you need to get started
The comdev PMC accepts oversight of the homepage and mailing list, and has ultimate decision power on how they are used.
...
To demonstrate interest and to share the load with the comdev PMC, we are asking that each community of interests nominates three ASF Members PMC members from interested PMCs to act as shepherds for those resources. They will be asked to provide the content for the homepage (managed at https://github.com/apache/comdev-site) and moderate the mailing list. Their Apache IDs must be indicated on the community homepage and kept up to date if they change.
One of these three people can then request the creation of the homepage and mailing list with a short justification explaining why it's needed, by creating a COMDEV ticket. Please mention the ASF IDs of the 3 PMC "shepherds", the desired short name (all lowercase, no spaces) for the new community and 1-2 paragraphs which describe it for the initial creation of its homepage.
For any questions you can reach out to the comdev PMC on the dev@community.a.o mailing list.