STATUS: proposal to the comdev PMC, who will need to vote to accept it if we agree discussed on our dev list, dormant for now due to lack of interest.
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 I am suggesting 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, but a few weeks later (July 1st) there's been no answer to requests for feedback on this updated proposal so this hasn't happened yet.
If we create this we might create SIGs for healthcare, osgi and iot, and more 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, on the dev@community.a.o mailing list.
Next steps
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 I'll mention this proposal on the dev@community.a.o list for PMC feedback and move to a vote to make it official if no one objects mailing list.