Feedback request: OpenJDK Community Innovator's Challenge Grants

[Andrew John Hughes]

On 03/01/2008, Ray Gans <Ray.Gans at sun.com> wrote:
>
>
> As you may have heard, Sun has announced the Community Innovation Awards
> Program (see *http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/awards/*<http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/awards/>)
> for several open source communities that we sponsor. The goal of this
> program is to foster and recognize innovation in these communities by
> offering grants/prizes to new efforts that will have an strong impact.
>
> The OpenJDK program will be called the OpenJDK Community Innovator's
> Challenge Grants (OCICG). We want to encourage developers to collaborate and
> creatively solve key problems facing the OpenJDK Community, initiate new
> projects that innovate on the OpenJDK code base, leverage the code for new
> uses, develop curricula and training, and port the code to new platforms,
> all to further the objectives of the OpenJDK Community in developing and
> disseminating compatible, free software implementations of the Java SE
> platform. We'd also like your help to make this program effective, valuable
> and fun for non-Sun participants.
>
> To implement this program, Sun will award several large grants to a few
> projects that can be completed by August 2008. Help us determine how to best
> select project proposals for consideration and allocate the money (we have
> approximately $175,000 to distribute).
>
> Here is how we're thinking it should work (though this may change based on
> your feedback):
>
> - On January 14, 2008 Sun will kick off the OCICG program and announce the
> criteria that will be used to select a set number of projects. OpenJDK
> participants will be encouraged to submit proposals for a project they want
> to work on. Proposals could be made by groups of individuals, existing F/OSS
> teams, companies/organizations, Java User Groups, etc.
> - Proposals will be accepted until March 3, 2008. At this time the
> proposals will be judged by a team of people (we're thinking 2 from Sun and
> 3 from outside Sun). We're also thinking of accepting only seven or less
> proposals.
> - Accepted proposals will be announced on March 17 ,2008 with all project
> work to be completed by August 4, 2008.
> - Awards will be delivered to completed projects on August 18, 2008 with
> cash amounts determined by the judges. We're thinking that the most valuable
> projects should be awarded a larger prize than others – though all completed
> projects will be given a cash award. Note that no money will be available
> until August and all awards must be distributed at that time. Obviously,
> judges and Sun personnel will be ineligible for any cash awards.
>
> Scope and Constraints
> - The program will begin in January 2008 and end in August 2008.
> - Since this program is technically an international contest, there are
> strict rules by which it must be run. For example, participation will be
> restricted to countries that allow these kinds of contests. We would like to
> make the program open to as many countries as possible, however, since every
> country has different laws and requirements, we cannot accommodate everyone.
> We won't have the exact country list until mid-January. Other rules may also
> apply that limit what can and can't be done as part of this program.
> - Projects can only have limited dependence on Sun
> involvement/participation. This is for fairness across all projects.
> Likewise, projects cannot require a commitment by Sun for significant
> time/effort for success since we cannot guarantee adequate Sun resources
> will be available -- for example, a project to build a better bug database
> for OpenJDK, while very useful, would require heavy involvement by Sun
> personnel to integrate it with Sun's internal bug management systems.
> - All project code (if any) must be contributed to Sun under the Sun
> Contributor Agreement (see *http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/sca.pdf
> * <http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/sca.pdf>).
>
> We are interested in what the OpenJDK community thinks about the OCICG.
> You can help by providing input on any of the following questions (and
> whatever else you'd like to comment on).
> -  What kind of projects do you think would be valuable to the OpenJDK
> community?
> - What selection criteria should be used to choose the best proposals?
> - How many proposals should be accepted?
> - Do you think the OpenJDK community at  large should have any input into
> the proposal selection process?
> - Who you think would make good objective judges for the program and why?
> - What thoughts do you have about how the proposal selection process
> should be handled?
> - Do you think the OpenJDK community at large should have any input into
> selecting projects that really excel (and be awarded larger prizes)?
> - What criteria should be used to determine the payout for cash awards?
> - How should abandoned or non-completed projects be handled and what
> should constitute a "completed" project?
> - How should awards be handled for project team members who drop out or
> are added after a proposal is accepted?
>
> Please send your thoughts to *discuss at openjdk.java.net*<discuss at openjdk.java.net>
> .
>
> Thanks,
>
> The OpenJDK team at Sun
>
>

My initial thought is that OpenJDK will suffer from still being a fairly
nascent project.  Without being disparaging to all the great work done by
Sun in releasing the OpenJDK source code (which must have been and still is
a huge task), there isn't yet much of an OpenJDK community, other than that
which it has adopted from existing projects such as GNU Classpath.  Is there
really the infrastructure in place to have a timed project take place?

That said, I'd love to see it happen and think it would be a great way of
fostering such a community if it could be made to happen.  As regards
projects, I think you have to just give fairly general criteria and see what
gets proposed.  Only then can you really decide on appropriateness and the
exact criteria to use.  Again, I think the problem will be that, at least my
impression so far, is that there are no really active unfunded projects
taking place which really interact with the core OpenJDK code base and bring
Sun and external developers together.  There is of course a porting effort
and the framebuffer toolkit project which are both external, so there may be
some interest there.  The other projects listed on the OpenJDK site are very
much internal Sun projects still; I'm on many of the mailing lists (too many
really for most people) and I don't see a lot of traffic on most of them.
Certainly nothing like patches, etc. but that's because the public
repositories have only just become available.  I don't want to sound
negative, but when you compare OpenJDK with OpenSolaris, which is also
taking part, there's a lot more activity already in existence which will
make things a lot easier for them.

One solution I think is to give each successful project it's own tree or
forest (depending on the scale of the project), just like each team does
now.  Encourage activity there and interaction between the participants.
This is certainly important as you seem to be proposing this to groups
rather than individuals, which I think is a plus. Allow frequent commits
there (with the appropriate SCA in place of course) and then handle the task
of whether or not to feed the result back to the main project in August.
When it comes to evaluating success, any successful project needs to have
clear defined goals for judging this as part of the proposal.  Having the
code in a public repository means that both incomplete and complete projects
will be accessible afterwards, even if the participants lose interest and
disappear.  The community can then decide how to handle the resulting work
most effectively.

As to payouts, it really depends on who you are trying to attract.  With
Google's Summer of Code, they aim this at individual students where the
money is the primary incentive and so the reward is predefined and given in
chunks, some of which is awarded before the project even begins (a project
that fails midway, for example, still gets the student $2500 out of $4500).
My perception of Sun's awards is more of one of bounties for groups of
participants, where I think the award can be justifiably set on evaluation
of the project and its merit, and then used as a bounty to be awarded only
on its successful completion.  The scheme would also be helped a lot if the
OpenJDK community came up with some suggested projects with appropriate
bounties to encourage contributions.  It should still be made clear that new
proposals are welcome, but this makes it easier for people to get involved
who only have a vague idea about what the OpenJDK needs.

I hope that's of some help,
-- 
Andrew :-)

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