The text below is from the perspective of a lab steward (Vipin Bharathan- later we have socialized this among the lab stewards to get a broader view)
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Hyperledger Labs have been a very important proving ground. For example for re-use of code and concepts between the SIGs, the eThaler project developed for the lab has seen the code for its token re-used on the Climate Action & accounting SIG. There are many other success stories.
Proposal:
Sponsors as they function today do not protect against any governance harm, their engagement past the initial proposal is minimal, unless they are also maintainers/committers. The proposal is to remove the requirement for sponsors in the application and fill the gaps for governance with automation, repo-linting and periodic reviews. We will develop a set of criteria about best practices. 4 volunteers cannot review 42 projects without automation.
Review the language in the labs charter on Sponsors.
Proposers need a Sponsor (i.e. a maintainer of one of the Hyperledger projects, a TSC member or a WG chair);
From the Process To Propose A New Lab
The sponsor(s) are responsible for reviewing the proposal. Sponsors do not have a responsibility beyond this; ongoing work like contributing code or reviews is not tied to their role as sponsors. In reviewing the proposal, the sponsor(s) make sure that the proposal is cogent, and novel (in conception, proposed execution, or interested community). To find sponsors a. the proposers can use their connections to existing projects and ask maintainers b. find working groups or projects with affinities to the proposed lab and pitch the project (good to have the template already filled out) in associated channels and or mailing lists. The WG chairs emails, the maintainers contacts etc. can be found on the wiki or github. Make personal appeals if you can.
This language was created to clarify the role of the Sponsor as well as to guide proposers in finding Sponsors, since we (the lab stewards) had several reports about the friction in finding Sponsors.
Specific cases:
Not all labs follow Apache
About the licensing issue in labs, two projects with no license file, 3 with CC-By-4.0 and of course the one with MIT. All others (37) have Apache 2.0- Sponsors nor lab stewards are not setup to catch this, suggest adding this to repolinter or to automation when creating the labs similar to the checks for DCO.
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