Tutored Lessons
Each lesson is an interactive session with an AI tutor rather than a document to read. You paste the lesson into a chat model, and it teaches you one idea at a time, sets exercises, waits for your answer before giving its own, and finishes with a self-check.
The lessons are written and fact-checked against ASF policy, the Incubator’s guides and the Incubator wiki, and they are explicit about which of those a given statement comes from.
How to run one
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Find the lesson you want below and click Copy prompt.
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Open any capable chat model.
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Paste the prompt as the first message, or into a system prompt field if the tool has one.
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Say hello. The tutor takes it from there.
Nothing is installed and nothing is recorded. If you prefer, View the prompt opens the plain text so you can read it first or copy it by hand.
Getting Started
These three come first. They are the prerequisite for everything below, and they assume no prior knowledge of the ASF.
1. What the Incubator is, and whether you want it
What a podling is, what a project hands over and gets back, who does what, and whether a community is ready to propose.
2. The Apache Way, in practice
Consensus, merit, community over code, transparency and independence, and how to tell whether a decision was made the Apache way.
3. Working in public: lists, tone, culture, time zones
Why messages read as rude when nobody meant it, choosing the right channel, working across time zones, and what the code of conduct asks.
Podling Startup and the PPMC
For people running a podling day to day. These five can be taken in any order.
4. From proposal to podling
The path from idea to podling: what a champion does, what a proposal has to establish, credible initial committers, and honest known risks.
5. Getting set up with Infra
What Infra does and what the project does, choosing between self-serve, a ticket and Whimsy, and writing a request that needs no round trip.
6. How decisions get made: lazy consensus, votes, vetoes
When something needs no vote, consensus or a formal vote, who is binding, the two-stage release vote, and what makes a veto valid.
7. Growing committers and the PPMC
What committers and PPMC members can and cannot do, running each process end to end, who to invite, and the awkward cases.
8. Writing a report the IPMC can use
Who reads a podling report and what they look for, what belongs in each section, reporting a bad month honestly, and the submission mechanics.
Legal, Branding and IP
The rules in these three come from the Foundation rather than the Incubator, so they apply the same way to a top-level project.
9. Legal basics: licences, ICLAs, provenance
Who owns contributed code, who files an ICLA or a software grant, what may be included in a release, and when incoming code needs IP clearance.
10. Names, trademarks and branding
What a podling must call itself, who owns the name, the suitable name search, what a website has to carry, and what third parties may do.
11. Privacy and data handling
Analytics, cookies, third-party assets and embeds, the public mailing list record and removal requests, and handling personal data.
As an installable skill
Some AI tools can install a skill, which saves the pasting. The eleven lessons
build into one, so /incubator-lesson list shows the catalogue and
/incubator-lesson 6 starts that lesson.
Build it from a checkout with python3 tools/ai-tutor/build-skill.py, then
install the result the way your tool expects. The lesson text inside it is
copied from the same files this page publishes, so both routes run the same
tutor.
A caution
These are teaching prompts, not policy. Where a lesson and an ASF policy page disagree, the policy page is correct. Models also make mistakes, so if you need a definitive answer for a real decision, ask your mentors or the Incubator’s general mailing list.
Corrections are welcome on that list. The lessons live in tools/ai-tutor in the website repository.