Lots to unpack here, Chris, and as it’s 11pm I may not do it full justice in this response but I did want to make a couple of quick points: 

• First come, first served project assessment has been a worry for the TOC ever since I have been involved, if not longer. Accepting a project can be beneficial for that project but might be detrimental for a competing project. So, we try to look at competing / alternative solutions as part of any assessment. The order in which things are submitted is not the most important factor here.

• I think we all would have liked CNCF Hub to be made public some time ago. To be fair to Dan, there have been some other pressing concerns to deal with in this time; I still think the project could have been made public sooner, but we are where we are. The TOC was made aware of the project, and I hope you’d agree we should act with all the information we have at our disposal.  It was clear that CNCF Hub would likely have an impact on the CNCF’s overall strategy around artifact discovery and distribution (and the operator hub is clearly in that space). Considering that strategy properly and calmly is in our view extremely important. We were aware that the delay was frustrating to the OF project and tried to at least give some explanation as to why there was hold-up (hence the comment in the PR that you refer to). 

Over the past few months we have been working to make the project assessment process more scalable and transparent. But IMO process should never trump doing what we believe is the right thing for the community.

Liz

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Liz Rice

@lizrice | lizrice.com | +44 (0) 780 126 1145

On 11 Mar 2020, 22:33 +0000, Chris Wright <chrisw@...>, wrote:

During the evaluation of the Operator Framework for acceptance into
the CNCF as an incubation project, I was surprised to learn that the
vote was being held up by a request on behalf of a project yet to be
submitted to the TOC and SIGs for review. You can see the comment
here: https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/303#issuecomment-594059717

The project, CNCF Hub, was just submitted March 10th to the TOC
mailing list as a project intended to be used as the CNCF standard for
discovering and installing projects within this ecosystem. This
project was mentioned to the community at KubeCon San Diego, but no
significant community awareness until March 10th. The project is being
released as pre-beta helm based project. The potential appearance of a
fait accompli by having this conceptual prototype with a CNCF domain
name is one of my concerns, as it can easily give a misleading view of
community and CNCF support.

As a foundation based on open source and open governance, I can't
accept a process that gives a CNCF sponsored project any special path
in or ability to hold up another project for consideration.

Projects should never be reviewed according to fluid, inconsistent or
secretive guidelines.

I recommend that we clarify the guidelines to ensure all projects are
treated equally and fairly.

thanks,
-chris