Governance/Approved/Incubation

= OpenStack Incubator Projects =

As the OpenStack community grows, new projects will be added and some existing projects will want to become official OpenStack core projects. The proposal below would amend the existing new project process to include a formal incubation step.

Purpose of Incubation
The incubation process will serve a number of purposes with the overall goal of ensuring that core OpenStack projects meet a high standard of usefulness and quality. Specifically, projects in incubation will receive guidance and time to grow and mature in the following areas:
 * 1) Sustainable development processes
 * 2) Growing the core development team
 * 3) Establishing an initial user base
 * 4) Maturing the software to an acceptable level of stability
 * 5) Integration with OpenStack processes around testing, releases, and community management

Process for Incubation

 * 1) Submit an application to the Policy Board using the template on the wiki: Projects/IncubatorApplication
 * 2) Policy Board will review the application and approve or deny the project for incubation
 * 3) If approved, the project may be assigned one or more mentors from the Policy Board
 * 4) The project may submit itself for consideration as a core project according to the requirements of the new project process
 * 5) If the project is not approved by the Policy Board to be promoted to a core project, it may continue as an incubated project
 * 6) If the project fails to make progress or becomes abandoned, the Policy Board may remove it from the incubation program

During the incubation process, the project will be required to submit regular status updates to the community describing the status and progress of the project. In general, a project will need to have successfully released at least two milestones and demonstrated a satisfactory level of integration with existing core projects before it will be considered as a core project.