Hi everyone,

Incubation is currently an OpenStack project status that grants a promising project more access to OpenStack shared resources, especially in the CI, release management and QA space. That status lets the promising project prove that it is ready to join other official OpenStack core projects for the next full development cycle.

In the past governance the Project Policy Board was the only decider on Incubation and Core inclusion. With the new governance, the Technical Committee is still the only decider on Incubation status and still proposes projects for Core inclusion, but the Board of Directors has the possibility to veto that Core inclusion.

This creates an awkward process where a project could go all the way through Incubation and be denied Core inclusion at the end of that process, basically wasting OpenStack resources. We need to evolve the Incubation process so that the question of whether a project belongs in "Core" is fully resolved as early as possible. And define how a project can enter, grow or exit the incubation process.

This also raises the question of whether "Core" should really be the only destination of an Incubated project. Which triggers the very question of what OpenStack Core actually is. For some it's the collection of OpenStack projects that work well and complement each other, for others Core should only include the IaaS pieces, for others they should represent the bare minimum you need to implement to be able to be called an "OpenStack Cloud"...

Once "Core" is defined we can evaluate the need for a category that would still be in "OpenStack" but not have the "Core" label on it. Incubation could then lead two ways.

We need to discuss all this in the next two weeks before delegates of the TC will join a committee with Board of Directors delegates to come to a final decision on this. So let the public discussion begin.

Cheers,