Proposal: new Ansible community package collection inclusion criteria and process for the SC-selected model

Project Discussions
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Hello everyone,

Following the decision in the Proposal: trim and restrict the Ansible community package down to a Steering-Committee-selected set topic (see the transition plan and the vote), we agreed to proceed with step 2: defining new inclusion criteria and a new process.

Here is a PR with the proposed changes: ansible-documentation#4065. Feel free to suggest any changes directly in the PR.

In short, the old open-submission inclusion workflow is replaced with a Steering-Committee-driven selection process. The key points:

New inclusion criteria

Inclusion of new collections is now exceptional. The Committee may consider a collection for inclusion when it meets the following criteria (any specific suggestions in the PR are appreciated). These criteria are not exhaustive; they serve as guidelines for the Committee’s judgment.

  • The collection automates infrastructure components, tools, or services that are essential and present in the majority of environments (for example, operating systems, DNS, containerization, cryptography, widely-used DevOps tools).
  • The collection is non-vendor-specific. An exception can be made for platforms so widely adopted that they are considered essential infrastructure (for example, major cloud providers).
  • The collection’s scope is broadly applicable across industries and use cases rather than limited to a specific domain or niche.
  • The collection satisfies the collections requirements.

New process

Any Committee member may nominate a collection for inclusion by creating a community topic. The Committee then discusses and votes on the nomination following the regular community topics workflow. I think this point is important for avoiding unnecessary distraction for SC. If someone else wants to nominate their stuff, all the contacts are in the SC policy guide.

Document reorganization

  • The criteria and process go into the Steering Committee governance document, replacing the old “Collection inclusion requests workflow” section.
  • The collections requirements document stays as the technical requirements spec — included collections must satisfy it to remain in the package. Old submission language has been cleaned up.
  • References to the old ansible-inclusion repo submission process have been updated across the docs.

Anyone’s feedback on this proposal is much appreciated. I’m going to start a vote once (and if) we get some approvals in the PR.

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The docs PR contains:

Any Committee member may nominate a collection for inclusion by creating a community topic. The Committee then discusses and votes on the nomination following the community topics workflow.

I think it would also be good if there’s a place where community members can suggest new collections to include, second other suggestions, or provider other kind of feedback (including, as one extreme, reasons why something better shouldn’t be included). This would also be very helpful to us (the SC) to figure out what random users find useful and what not.

(I’m not sure this is something that should already be part of this PR, or something that has its own discussion first.)

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I understand “creating a community topic” as creating a normal / open thread here on the forum. So this would be the place where community members can give feedback.

This still doesn’t allow community members to suggest new collections for inclusion. How about changing the text to something like:

Any Committee community member may nominate a collection for inclusion by creating a community topic. The Committee then discusses and votes community then discusses on the nomination and the Steering Committee votes on inclusion following the community topics workflow.

Or something like this?

DISCLAIMER: I didn’t have a look at the PR itself yet, just answering the comment from @felixfontein.

BTW I think that the vote on inclusion should be SC only.

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@felixfontein @mariolenz SGTM, thanks for the suggestiions!

@mariolenz could you please suggest the wording in the PR? Then, I’ll update the description of this topic to reflect that.