First off, please take this in the sprit in which it's intended. It's not meant to be snarky or argumentative, (though it will probably sound that way), it's just meant to start a conversation.

I've been thinking a lot about the conversation about working groups from this morning's meeting, and I think we're missing a fundamental issue.

What I heard was a lot of talk about how "we don't want to be kingmakers" and "people put more importance on being a CNCF project than they should".  Well, if being a CNCF project doesn't mean anything ... why do it?

In fact, why have a foundation at all?

If the purpose of the CNCF is just to foster cloud native computing, and not to validate a project's existence, then why handle projects at all?  Why not just create standards, or even just recommendations, as W3C did/does(?).

I guess what I'm saying is that while nobody likes politics -- and believe me I DESPISE them -- if you're going to have a foundation that is supposed to mean something, then ... it should mean something.

So my feeling is that we either bite the bullet and get tough about letting projects in -- even if that means asking them to perhaps work together, or create a joint API and then manage the API -- or we drop the pretenses and just create a directory anybody can add themselves to.

See, I told you it would sound snarky, but really, I am only trying to start the discussion.

Somebody please, tell me what I'm missing here.

----  Nick