Create loopback4 community organization

[mrbatista]

Suggestion

Hi, like ionic capacitor community what do you think if we created a loopback4 community organization that contains plugins, tools, and other projects that are driven by the community?

[dhmlau]

@mrbatista, thanks for your suggestion. There is a https://github.com/strongloop-community, would that be something you're looking for?

[mrbatista]

@dhmlau Yes! How user can candidate own project to be listed here in or create new one?

[dhmlau]

That's a good question. I think you need to be a member of that github org at the minimum (I can add you there).
I'm not sure how the projects were added in the past, because looking at the settings, it doesn't seem like members can create a repo (though they have other rights). Maybe @bajtos might know.

[bajtos]

Thank you @mrbatista for starting the discussion. Let me move this issue to loopback-governance to make it stand out from regular project "noise".

[bajtos]

First of all, we already have https://loopback.io/doc/en/lb4/Community-extensions.html to highlight extensions maintained by the community.

I would like to better understand what benefits do you @mrbatista see in having a dedicated GitHub organization to host community-maintained LoopBack modules?

IMO, there should be clear criteria for accepting a project to such GitHub org. Example criteria to consider: number of active committers/maintainers, license, code of conduct, quality requirements (tests, code coverage, linter), coding style, etc.

We should be also mindful about security. While most people joining the community GH org will have good intentions, we must be prepared to deal with the situation when somebody turns into a bad actor. Anybody remembers event-stream compromise?

To be honest, I am not sure if the benefits of a GH org for LB community are worth the effort needed to discuss & agree on all details and setup the necessary processes.

From what I seen so far, our community is not very active. If an extension has a single solo maintainer only, then I think it's better to host it as a personal project of that maintainer. That way the person is fully in control and we have less work with checking whether the project is still meeting our acceptance criteria. Once the project reaches enough popularity and several active maintainers, it may be better to move it to the main loopback-next monorepo, rather than to a lb-community org on GH.

Please don't be discouraged by my view and do try to come up with arguments why your proposal is worth the effort!

I guess it all depends on what are we trying to optimize for, what are you trying to achieve or improve? What pain points do you see in the current setup? Maybe there are other ways how to remove them?