Provide details on "Users" listing requirements

[pluradj]

On the main JanusGraph web site, there is a section for Users (The following users have deployed JanusGraph in production). It would be great to provide a page that describes the requirements to be listed. I'd imagine that the process would be pretty simple, along the lines of:

• Send an email to janusgraph-dev with a short description of the product's JanusGraph use case, including the product name and version that uses it
• 72 hour lazy consensus by committers
• Provide clear external documentation of your product's usage of JanusGraph, including proper attribution and linkage to the JanusGraph project
• Approval vote is required

For reference, here are the Apache TinkerPop index listing requirements:

• The project must be either a TinkerPop-enabled graph system, a Gremlin language variant/compiler, a Gremlin language driver, or a TinkerPop-enabled middleware tool.
• The project must have a public URL that can be referenced by Apache TinkerPop.
• The project must have at least one release.
• The project must be actively developed/maintained to a current or previous "y" version of Apache TinkerPop (3.y.z).
• The project must have some documentation and that documentation must make explicit its usage of Apache TinkerPop and its version compatibility requirements.

[mbrukman]

I'm assuming you're proposing applying the same policy to listing on https://github.com/janusgraph/janusgraph/#users as well?

[pluradj]

I think it's good enough, but others want to adjust it differently for this project, that would be worth a discussion.

A potential user reached out to me offline, and I couldn't remember how the existing Users were decided, so I thought it would be worthwhile to document the policy publicly for the convenience of future Users.

[mbrukman]

@pluradj — I've been pretty lax up to now about accepting new use cases, basically taking company employees at their word that they're using it in production and adding them. Typically, it's the engineers or CTOs of companies who are directly doing the JanusGraph implementation that reached out, so it seems pretty safe.

Re: proposed requirements:

Send an email to janusgraph-dev describing your product's usage of JanusGraph

This I'm perfectly fine with, this is the minimal requirement.

Provide clear external documentation of your product's usage of JanusGraph, including proper attribution and linkage to the JanusGraph project

This may be an issue for some folks: their company may or may not be interested in writing a public blog post about their infrastructure, and depending on the company, it may require a lot of review from legal/PR/marketing/etc., and they may choose not to document it.

I would say this is a nice to have rather than a requirement. I would prefer to list more companies with a one-liner description of their use case, than to require a public doc, presentation, or blog post mentioning JanusGraph before listing it.

Approval vote by committers is required

I'm not sure under which conditions folks would decline to list a company as a user if they claim they're using JanusGraph — even if they write a detailed blog post, we cannot verify if they are, in fact, using it, or using it as they said they do. We're still taking their word for it. So this will essentially be a rubber-stamp, unless committers see any egregious issues in either of the two points above.

[pluradj]

Good points, @mbrukman. One-liner description of their use case would be good. Right now we just have a collection of icons. Agreed on a formal vote -- the email thread started by the product would be enough to drive consensus.

[pluradj]

@mbrukman I made revisions to the initial writeup based on previous discussion above.

[mbrukman]

LGTM

Does this need to be a discussion / vote on janusgraph-dev@? Or does this need to be transformed into a PR, and committers can vote on the PR via approvals / comments?