Thanks to everyone who provided their input on this topic so far. Maybe it seems like it has gone a little cold here in the forum but we, the community team at Red Hat, have been discussing criteria for ecosystem inclusion in the background. As a lot of the discussion here indicates, it is a tricky one to get right for all and also highlights, once again, the need for a more robust community governance strategy. However that is well beyond the scope of the topic at hand.
So where are we? It seems that if we want to start including community projects in the ecosystem, not only do we need a set of criteria, we also need an inclusion process in some form. From the collection inclusion process in the Ansible package we’ve seen that participation can put burden on already dedicated, amazing contributors. We kind of feel like adding to that burden risks overloading folks who are already doing superhero-level workloads.
It’s questionable if the outcome is worth the effort. In the end we’d basically have the same thing that we have right now. Sure, we could combine the list of RH-managed projects with some of the projects in the Awesome Ansible list. But it’s unlikely the Awesome Ansible list would go away completely because there would still be projects that don’t meet the “table stakes” criteria.
Another factor that is influencing outcome here is that the new “ansible.com” website has its own ecosystem page. Putting the ecosystem page on the docs subdomain was always intended to be a temporary thing. The community team created that page on the docs subdomain because it was the best place for it to go, within the bounds of what we could control. And, while we did write the code for the new ecosystem page on ansible.com, the community team doesn’t have ownership of the actual content.
The point here is that it doesn’t make sense to have two ecosystem pages and an Awesome Ansible list. That’s fragmentation that doesn’t help anyone. And you’re welcome to open PRs against the new website and request projects be included in the ecosystem page, but that’s not something the community team can approve or merge.
We, the community team, feel like the best thing is to update the ecosystem page on the docsite so that it points to ansible.com/ecosystem and the Awesome Ansible list. That seems like it sort of solves the problem for the most part. From the docsite ecosystem, users will be able to find both Red Hat-managed projects as well as everything the Ansible community has to offer.
At some point in future we’ll probably have that broader governance issue figured out (which should also encompass “ansible.com”) and we can revisit the “table stakes” conversation. For now, it seems like a simpler approach is the right one. It might not be the ideal outcome but hopefully it’s a step in the right direction.
EDIT: Somehow the first part of this message got truncated. 