Thanks, John!
Posted:
https://wiki.apache.org/incubator/AnnotatorProposal
-----Original Message-----
From: John D. Ament [mailto:johndament@apache.org]
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2016 9:50 AM
To: general@incubator.apache.org; Benjamin Young <byoung@bigbluehat.com>
Subject: Re: [PROPOSAL] Apache Annotator
Hi Benjamin,
I've added bigbluehat to the contributors group, feel free to post your proposal there.
John
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 9:46 AM Benjamin Young <byoung@bigbluehat.com>
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have been working with the AnnotatorJS.org community to move our
> community to the ASF. We have in the past been a BDFL-led group, but
> that has proved unsustainable and resulted in many forks and lost opportunity.
>
> Recently, many community members gathered at the http://iannotate.org/
> conference and subsequent hackathon and discussed the future of the
> project. We again concluded that the ASF held the most promise for a
> governance style that could support our growing community and assure
> that collaboration continue into the future.
>
> Our Incubator Proposal is current here (also below in markdown):
> https://github.com/openannotation/annotator/wiki/Apache-Incubation-Pro
> posal
>
> I would be happy to move the proposal to the incubator wiki-my user
> name there is `bigbluehat`.
>
> Our current mailing list has a running vote/discussion around this
> proposal and our move to the ASF:
> https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/annotator-dev/2016-May/001615.html
>
> Lastly, we have a Champion (Daniel Gruno), but are still in need of
> Mentors.
>
> Thank you for considering this proposal!
> Benjamin - bigbluehat@apache.org
>
>
>
> Apache Annotator Proposal:
> #### Abstract
> > A short descriptive summary of the project. A short paragraph,
> > ideally
> one sentence in length.
>
> Annotation enabling code for browsers, servers, and humans.
>
> #### Proposal
> > A lengthier description of the proposal.
>
> The Annotator community seeks to build a foundational set of libraries
> under a liberal license providing the pieces necessary for developers
> to add annotation to their projects.
>
> #### Background
> > Provides context for those unfamiliar with the problem space and history.
>
> Annotator.js was originally created by Open Knowledge (formerly The
> Open Knowledge Foundation) to provide annotation over works by Shakespeare.
> Since that time, Annotator has found its way into a wide range of
> browser-based annotation systems such as Hypothes.is,
> LacunaStories.com, and various academic, publishing, and scientific research projects.
>
> Sadly, this increased usage has primarily happened in forks of the
> main code or through copy-left licensed plugins that prevent their use
> by many community members.
>
> However, the community remains interested in combined collaboration
> and interested in a foundational future for annotation--both in
> browsers as well as servers and desktop/mobile applications.
>
> #### Rationale
>
> > Explains why this project needs to exist and why should it be
> > adopted by
> Apache.
>
> Annotation is often implemented in projects in ad hoc ways with
> developers often re-solving problems well known to the Annotator
> community. The Annotator community works to provide knowledge and code
> to help developers more quickly implement or improve annotation within their projects.
>
> We believe bringing the Annotator community into the Apache Software
> Foundation will allow for wider recognition of the annotation problem
> space, help more developers find their way to solving this shared
> problem, provide increased cohesion for our own somewhat fractured
> community, and increase the use of commonly shared code within a wide range of projects.
>
> #### Initial Goals
>
> * create a collaborative space for the existing Annotator contributors
> and community
> * further ignite interest and activity around annotation
> * build foundational libraries for annotation
> * implement code to support the Web Annotation Data Model, Protocol,
> and other annotation related specifications
> * potentially re-license Annotator under the Apache License 2.0
> * Annotator is currently licensed under a combination of the MIT &
> GPL
> * consolidate (where possible) community activity around building
> add-ons, annotation storage providers, and use-case specific feature
> sets
> * grow interest and activity in annotation
>
> #### Current Status
>
> ##### Meritocracy
> > Apache is a meritocracy.
>
> The project is in transition from a primarily BDFL-based model to one
> with a more diverse set of committers. There are 36 total known
> commiters to Annotator. 3 commiters having done the bulk of the coding
> and decision making. 2 of those commiters acting as project leadership.
>
> However, the community is much larger and more diverse when the
> various forks and plugin authors are considered.
>
> We intend to invite and include participants from a wide array of
> annotation problem spaces to collaborate in this new shared space.
>
> ##### Community
> > Apache is interested only in communities.
>
> Community calls had been being done every 3-6 months with reports of
> the calls outcome being posted to the mailing list and the
> annotatorjs.org website.
>
> Most activity within the project happens on the mailing list. There is
> also a relatively inactive #annotator channel on irc.freenode.net. The
> website is primarily for promotion and includes promotion of community
> plugins and showcases projects using Annotator. Documentation is
> published on readthedocs.org and linked to from the website.
>
> There are many Annotator and W3C Annotation Data Model related
> projects found on GitHub. Our objective would be to invite these
> communities to join this collaborative community with the hope of
> greater stability and community longevity.
>
> ##### Core Developers
> > Apache is composed of individuals.
>
> The 3 primary committers to the project are Nick Stenning of The
> Hypothesis Project, Randall Leeds of Medal, and Aron Carroll of
> Dropbox, Inc. Nick Stenning is the original creator of Annotator.
> Randall Leeds is an Apache CouchDB committer. Aron has been a frequent
> contributor. All three have been members of The Hypothes.is Project in past years.
>
> Other currently active community members include:
>
> * Andrew Magliozzi of FinalsClub.org
> * Andrew drives the scheduling of community calls, is active on the
> mailing list, and encourages progress within the project and community
> * Benjamin Young of Wiley (also formerly of The Hypothes.is Project)
> * an Apache CouchDB commiter
> * co-editor of the Web Annotation Data Model
> * Oliver Sauter of WordBrain
> * active advocate for Annotator and the growth of the annotation
> community
>
> Other committers have contributed significant amounts of code,
> content, or issues and discussions, but are currently (in the last 3-6
> months) less active on the project. However, at recent annotation
> related conferences the scale of the plugin, fork, and ancillary
> project activity was shown to be much higher than what was apparent
> from activity on the main Annotator mailing list--in part due to
> community fracturing...something we hope to fix with joining the ASF.
>
> A full list of Annotator contributors can be seen here:
> https://github.com/openannotation/annotator/graphs/contributors
>
> ##### Alignment
> > Describe why Apache is a good match for the proposal.
>
> The Annotator community believes that the Apache Software Foundation
> promotes and enforces the sort of community that will best serve the
> future of the project. It is also believed that Annotator can serve
> the ASF by providing its tools to bring annotation into various Apache
> projects and eventually to the apache.org site, project documentation,
> and other tools within the ASF.
>
> The priority is on increasing community involvement, defining--via the
> Apache Way--how we will code and collaborate going forward, and upon
> creating the best possible annotation solution born out of that
> collaboration.
>
> #### Known Risks
> > An exercise in self-knowledge. Risks don't mean that a project is
> unacceptable. If they are recognized and noted then they can be
> addressed during incubation.
>
> ##### Orphaned products
> > A public commitment to future development.
>
> The majority of the core committers were formerly from The Hypothes.is
> Project which used an earlier version of Annotator within it's
> annotation web service and BSD-licensed `h` annotation software.
> However, Hypothesis and most other organizations and projects using
> Annotator have forked the main code base or created unique plugins
> which only exist within their projects and have not been contributed upstream.
>
> The fracturing of the community and previous single-entity
> contribution has greatly prohibited collaboration and growth of the community.
> Concurrently, interest and growth of annotation projects from a wide
> constituents has grown--though around a much wider array of code and
> projects. The hope is that the creation of a collaborative space built
> for discussion and sharing of these tools would provide the
> opportunity to reach a common core to be shared among the many diverse players.
>
> As such, the Annotator project has begun the process of becoming an
> Apache project to establish a development and community process that
> encourages diversity and cross-organization collaboration.
>
> ##### Inexperience with Open Source
>
> Annotator was established as an Open Source project in 2011 with it's
> first, v0.0.1 release being made on January 1st of that year:
> https://github.com/openannotation/annotator/releases/tag/v0.0.1
>
> The project has continued since that time as an open source project
> developed on GitHub. The community has grown in diversity since that
> time and was moved into a separate "openannotation" GitHub
> organization (from the original "okfn" GitHub organization) in 2014 in
> an effort to increase community involvement and diversity.
>
> Each of the core committers have worked on and created open source
> software for themselves or various organizations for the greater than
> 5 years. Two of the contributors mentioned above also have greater
> than 5 years contributor experience at the ASF and are both now core
> committers to a top-level project (Apache CouchDB).
>
> ##### Homogeneous Developers
> > Healthy projects need a mix of developers. Open development requires
> > a
> commitment to encouraging a diverse mixture. This includes the art of
> working as part of a geographically scattered group in a distributed
> environment.
>
> Active community members as well as plugin and compatible annotation
> storage system builders are from a diverse, though scattered, range of
> organizations and individually driven projects.
>
> The Annotator community is seeking to combine its efforts into a core
> group of committers to more accurately encourage a shared foundation
> as well as continue the growth in diversity of the community.
>
> Geographically, the Annotator community is widely distributed from
> Germany, Hungary, the East and West coasts of the US, and Australia.
>
> Additionally, the wide range of annotation related projects that may
> be considered as input for this projects code explorations range in
> size, contributor diversity, and growth.
>
> ##### Reliance on Salaried Developers
> > A project dominated by salaried developers who are interested in the
> code only whilst they are employed to do so risks its long term health.
>
> In the past, contributors to Annotator project were solely from The
> Hypothes.is Project and their activity was driven primarily by the
> needs of that project. However, the diversity of interested
> participants has greatly increased. There is an additional hope of
> creating an aggregated community from various projects (including
> Annotator, Hypothesis' `h` code, and various related libraries and
> plugins) as well as exploring the creation of new tools--not only for
> the browser--to further widen the interest and activity around annotation.
>
> ##### Relationships with Other Apache Projects
> > Apache projects should be open to collaboration with other open
> > source
> projects both within Apache and without. Candidates should be willing
> to reach outside their own little bubbles.
>
> The Annotator community also provides an annotation storage system
> ("annotator-store") built upon ElasticSearch. There are compatible
> implementations of that API built on various storage systems
> (including Apache CouchDB), and the community would encourage the
> creation of other compatible storage systems built upon other Apache storage projects.
>
> Additionally, Annotator is a JavaScript library which could serve any
> of the various CMS projects within Apache.
>
> The roadmap for Annotator also includes compatibility with the Web
> Annotation Data Model which is a JSON-LD serialization of an RDF-based
> data model for annotation. The growing number of RDF-focused Apache
> projects could take advantage of and contribute to the creation of these features.
>
> The W3C Annotation Working Group is also creating multiple related
> deliverables around Web Annotation including an Linked Data
> Platfrom-based Protocol specification, a note about selector systems,
> and future notes for various serialization and integration
> opportunities for the Web Annotation Data Model. Apache Marmotta is
> one project within the ASF which has native support for LDP and may
> have an interest in collaborating around implementation of the Web Annotation Protocol.
>
> Lastly, Apache UIMA can currently generates Open Annotation Data Model
> annotations as an output of it's Natural Language Processing system.
> These annotations could be displayed via code written within this new
> Apache project--which could further leverage user interaction with
> those NLP-based annotation (such as confirmation, rejection, or
> modification of the annotations made by Apache UIMA's NLP process).
> There are other NLP projects within the ASF which could similarly
> benefit from these explorations and code generated here.
>
> ##### A Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand
> > Concerns have been raised in the past that some projects appear to
> > have
> been proposed just to generate positive publicity for the proposers.
> This is the right place to convince everyone that is not the case.
>
> The Annotator community acknowledges the value and recognition that
> the Apache brand would bring to the Annotator project. However, the
> primary interest is in the community building process and long-term
> stability that the Apache Software Foundation provides for its projects.
>
> We do hope for increased recognition of and contribution to an array
> of annotation code projects built within this community. However, we
> primarily hope for community aggregation driven by building a core set
> of tools for our shared set of needs which are now scattered across
> various annotation endeavors.
>
> Integrating those developers into this new community and adding them
> as contributors is seen as a much higher priority then increasing
> awareness through branding.
>
> #### Documentation
> > References to further reading material.
>
> Websites:
> * http://annotatorjs.org/
> * http://w3.org/annotation/
>
> Documentation:
> * http://docs.annotatorjs.org/en/v1.2.x/
> * http://docs.annotatorjs.org/en/latest/
> * http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/
> * http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/
>
> Mailing List:
> * https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/annotator-dev/
> * https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-annotation/
>
> Code:
> * https://github.com/openannotation/annotator
> * https://github.com/openannotation/annotator-store
> * https://github.com/azaroth42/MangoServer
> * https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-anchor-text-quote
> * https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-anchor-text-position
> * https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-anchor-fragment
>
> Annotator plugin index:
> * http://annotatorjs.org/plugins/index.html
>
> #### Initial Source
> > Describes the origin of the proposed code base. If the initial code
> arrives from more than one source, this is the right place to outline
> the different histories.
>
> The original Annotator code base was created by Nick Stenning while at
> the Open Knowledge Foundation. The code has been in development since
> before
> 2011 with the first public release (v0.0.1) happening on January 1st,
> 2011 on GitHub.
>
> The example annotation storage system (which works with Annotator's
> stock Store plugin) had it's first release in February 21, 2011 and
> was originally built for Apache CouchDB. The contributor list of
> annotator-store is similar, but the license is simply the MIT (rather
> than MIT & GPL). The stated copyright is 2010-2012 Open Knowledge Foundation.
>
> Additionally, there is a growing list of forks, plugins, and related
> tooling created by the community in various places--often embedded
> within larger projects. The Annotator Plugins index has reference to
> some such possible inputs to this project's code. The W3C
> specifications are also being implemented and the growing number of
> projects available around those specifications would also be
> considered as possible inputs. Most specifically, Randal Leeds (also a
> contributor to Annotator) has built a set of libraries focus on
> implementing the W3C selectors. These libraries could serve as an
> initial foundation for a core library for browsers or JavaScript-base server code.
>
> #### Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan
> > Complex proposals (typically involving multiple code bases) may find
> > it
> useful to draw up an initial plan for the submission of the code here.
> Demonstrate that the proposal is practical.
>
> Our primary goal is to aggregate communities that center around
> annotation. We intend to focus our initial work on a JavaScript-based
> library built from Randall Leeds `dom-anchor-*` libraries (single
> owner copyright; MIT licensed) and potentially reusing code from
> Annotator (mixed owner copyright; MIT & GPL dual-licensed).
>
> The Annotator community has a stated copyright owner of "The Annotator
> Community." All contributions are believed to have been made "in kind"
> and the copyright owned by the various contributors. The three primary
> committers have stated a willingness to donate their contributions to
> the Apache Software Foundation and the minimal parts with copyright
> owned by others will likely be rewritten. Though we also hope to
> engage these individuals to join the combined efforts being made at the ASF.
>
> The `annotator-store` project is under a clearer, single BSD license.
> The copyright holder is stated to be the Open Knowledge Foundation
> with the years 2010-2012. It is likely that this code will only be
> used for reference or via library inclusion and not directly developed
> upon within the ASF.
>
> An earlier process was undertaken to collect re-licensing permission
> from known contributors via the existing mailing list and GitHub
> issues--using a model similar to Twitter's when it relicensed
> Bootstrap. General agreement was reached, but no decisive actions were
> taken as many contributors of smaller amounts of code were no longer reachable.
>
> We hope to engage the various plugin and fork authors along with
> similar annotation projects to engage future work under a shared
> license and developed within The Apache Way. The contribution of
> specific code to this project or its future deliverables will be
> handled individually by the community over the course of the project.
>
> One core goal of bringing the community to the ASF is to avoid this
> confused licensing situation in the future.
>
> #### External Dependencies
>
> Annotator depends on the following JavaScript modules from NPM:
>
> * backbone-extend-standalone - MIT
> * browserify-shim - MIT
> * clean-css - MIT
> * enhance-css - MIT
> * es6-promise - MIT
> * insert-css - MIT
> * jquery - MIT
> * through - MIT / Apache License 2.0
> * xpath-range - MIT + GPL-3.0+ Dual License
>
> annotator-store depends on the following Python modules:
>
> * elasticsearch - Apache License 2.0
> * PyJWT - MIT
> * iso8601 - MIT
> * six - MIT
>
> MongoServer (a Web Annotation Platform implementation) is a single
> owner project currently licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
>
> Randall Leeds `dom-anchor-*` libraries are all licensed under the MIT
> and include these dependencies:
>
> * dom-anchor-fragment - MIT
> * no dependencies
> * dom-anchor-text-position - MIT
> * node-iterator-shim - MIT
> * dom-seek - MIT
> * dom-anchor-text-quote - MIT
> * dom-anchor-text-position - MIT
> * diff-match-patch - Apache License 2.0
>
> #### Required Resources
>
> ##### Mailing Lists
>
> * private@
> * dev@
> * commits@
>
> Note: the Annotator community currently uses a single list hosted by
> Open Knowledge at:
> https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/annotator-dev
>
> ##### Git Repository
>
> * https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-annotator.git
>
> Note: the Annotator community hosts its code on GitHub as part of the
> "openannotation" organization. Randall Leeds also uses GitHub for his
> `dom-anchor-*` libraries as does Rob Sanderson for his Web Annotation
> Protocol implementation. These are all potential code inputs to be
> considered for reuse or continuation by this community.
>
> * http://github.com/openannotation/annotator
> * http://github.com/openannotation/annotator-store
> * https://github.com/azaroth42/MangoServer
> * https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-anchor-text-quote
> * https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-anchor-text-position
> * https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-anchor-fragment
>
> ##### Issue Tracking
>
> The Annotator community would prefer to continue using GitHub Issues
> if that is a possibility.
>
> ##### Other Resources
>
> * static website hosting for annotatorjs.org
>
> #### Initial Commiters
>
> * Nick Stenning <nick@whiteink.com>
> * Randall Leeds <randall@apache.org>
> * Benjamin Young <bigbluehat@apache.org>
> * Oliver Sauter <oli@worldbrain.io>
> * Andrew Magliozzi <andrew10961@gmail.com>
> * Aron Carroll <hello@aroncarroll.com>
> * Mariano Giagante <mariano.giagante@gmail.com>
> * Luke Murphy <lukewm@riseup.net>
>
> #### Affiliations
>
> * Nick Stenning of The Hypothes.is Project
> * Randall Leeds of Medal
> * Benjamin Young of Wiley
> * Oliver Sauter of WorldBrain.io
> * Aron Carroll of Dropbox, Inc.
> * Andrew Magliozzi of AdmitHub.com
> * Mariano Giagante of WorldBrain.io
> * Luke Murphy of WorldBrain.io
>
> #### Sponsors
>
> ##### Champion
>
> [Daniel Gruno](http://people.apache.org/phonebook.html?uid=humbedooh)
> aka `humbedooh`
>
> ##### Nominated Mentors
>
> TBD
>
> ##### Sponsoring Entity
> > The Sponsor is the organizational unit within Apache taking
> responsibility for this proposal. The sponsoring entity can be: the
> Apache Board, the Incubator, another Apache project
>
> The Incubator
>
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