[Foundation-l] Proposal for new projects

[John Vandenberg]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com> wrote:
> A mixture, I guess. The idea of a regularly scheduled process to launch
> new projects seems reasonable, and an annual cycle sounds good to me. A
> firm commitment to launch one (and only one) beta project per year does
> not. If there are multiple great concepts, or none, I don't want us to
> be bound to a quota. But if there's a basic altitude for achieving
> launch, presumably losing too much altitude after launch would justify
> shutting down before there's a crash.

The idea of only launching one does appeal to me, for two reasons.

1. if we only launch one, the community needs to make a decision about
which is most appropriate, which means evaluating each proposal on its
merits.  The second most favourable project would be likely to the one
selected the following year.

2. we haven't launched any for a very long time, despite having many
proposals on the table for a very long time.  A fixed schedule for
working through the backlog is more likely to convince the community
that the WMF will actually start a beta, and therefore encourage the
proponents of each proposal to devote time to building consensus.

--
John Vandenberg