Date
1 - 12 of 12
Proposal for a new "Steering Committee Charter"
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alexis richardson
Hi all
Please see below a link to a public document that describes a proposed charter for projects wishing to establish a Steering Committee. https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Hiz1dGYRS7GcjedpRVnSlDjIj0AVjeTa0-Td7aW-Lk/edit?usp=sharing The model proposed in the doc is intended to provide 'best practice' for projects and governance through graduation and beyond. It is not intended to be mandatory. It is consistent with our existing CNCF TOC Principles. The model addresses some of the questions raised in this github thread - https://github.com/cncf/toc/issues/459 I welcome commentary in the doc or on this list. alexis |
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Josh Berkus
On 7/2/20 2:50 PM, alexis richardson wrote:
Hi allHey, this is a really useful advisory. I'd like to include it in the Governance WG advisory documents, and collaborate on it there, if you're up for it? -- -- Josh Berkus Kubernetes Community Red Hat OSPO |
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alexis richardson
Josh
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Thanks! I would like to keep this at top level (TOC) for now, to maximise the attention on it. Once the foundational principles have been established (or rejected) by the TOC, I would be very happy to move it into the WG for further details and, if needed, a long term home. alexis On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 11:56 PM Josh Berkus <jberkus@...> wrote:
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alexis richardson
Thanks Quinton, you raise good points. The SC is indeed meant to add value to the project and not introduce bureaucracy or 'interference'. Most projects are pretty good at running themselves. We should aim for guidelines that protect that principle. I agree, strongly, that economic incentives are super important for driving purposeful and sustainable development. The SC model attempts to introduce enough ecosystem balance to solve the open core described in the doc, while keeping enough incentives in place. The mechanism is to look to others than the core maintainers to help with the balance. It's only one model, and I think other models are good too. This model in particular should help keep ISVs interested and bring users closer to projects. On Thu, 9 Jul 2020, 06:30 Quinton Hoole, <quinton@...> wrote:
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Quinton Hoole <quinton@...>
Nice idea, and very well written doc. I can't help thinking that it might promote excess and undesirable bureaucracy though, unless quite carefully scoped. Anecdotally, the most common failure modes of oss projects appear to center around a shortage of suitably skilled contributors to competently plan, design, build and document commonly required functionality. That is in turn typically caused by lack of willingness by companies to hire, pay and otherwise support said suitably skilled contributors (specifically engineers/coders and project co-ordinator/managers). Assuming that the above assertions are true, presumably we want to incentivize companies and individuals to fill the above gaps (i.e. fund competent engineers and project managers) , rather than form committees to decide what should hypothetically be done by the aforementioned missing people? Alternatively stated, should the companies who find and pay the people needed to build what's required, not get to strongly influence what's built? If such competent contributions are being unreasonably blocked, I agree that a good escalation path is needed. Ultimately I think this should end up at well-constitued SIGS and the TOC, but a more focussed Steering Committee per project might we'll make sense, in some cases. But perhaps its purpose should be squarely focussed on ensuring that real and legitimate contributions are not unreasonably blocked. That's all. Q On Thu, Jul 2, 2020, 14:50 alexis richardson <alexis@...> wrote: Hi all |
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Josh Berkus
As promised, we had an in-depth discussion of the Steering Committee
proposal drafted by Alexis Richardson for the July 7th TOC meeting during the Governance WG meeting. Six members were present and participated in the discussion; notes are available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSfiN1PRL3dH_ohfAs1lYvNWaBpAdvAI-9OQZYYIx8ahgy6230_oRbqljl6dUiGf5hTVJiferJgBmSX/pub Assessment: Regarding the specific proposal of using steering committees (SC) as a workaround for the requirement to have maintainers from multiple organizations for projects to move to the Graduated level, the Governance WG recommends that the TOC not adopt it. Full explanation: Steering Committees are frequently important governance tools for large and distributed projects, and more projects should consider having one as a channel for end-user, collaborator, and diverse audience representation. We valued Alexis’ writeup, and would like to incorporate it into our handbooks in progress for CNCF projects on how to develop governance. Projects that would need the "SC workaround" are projects that have been unable to attract a single maintainer from outside the original sponsoring organization, which is usually a sign of serious issues within the project. The Governance WG feels that the CNCF ecosystem is ill-served by moving projects with such problems to the Graduated level, and the proposal will not have the desired outcomes. Our decision was based on what we view as the inability of a non-technical Steering Committee to ensure that a project with maintainers* exclusively employed by the same organization treat submissions, roadmap items, and maintainer candidates from other organizations fairly. Even diligent SC members would find it difficult to understand enough about technical architecture decisions to differentiate between bias and legitimate objections in reviews. Further, unlike code and docs maintainers, it would be challenging for the TOC to monitor activity and involvement levels of SC members, as that would not create the same kind of contribution trail. For this proposal, we considered specifically projects that are having problems attracting contributors, because only such projects would need this mechanism. It certainly takes time to bring code reviewers up to speed, but the current requirement is a low bar; even a single dedicated documentation leader from an end-user company would technically satisfy it. While many folks have cited the Kubernetes project as an example, Kubernetes has a diversity of maintainers all the way down to the SIG level, so it would qualify for a maintainer multi-org requirement even without a Steering Committee. At this point, the Governance WG does not know of a good example of a project that successfully has used an SC to moderate the influence of development being dominated by a single company, so doing so would be experimental. As an experiment, we might adopt it for one specific project, but we'd want to see the outcome of that before we adopt it as general policy. Even Alexis’s document suggests that in problem cases it would be up to the TOC or their delegates to intervene to resolve project problems. Given this, it’s unclear what advantage having an SC would offer over Alexis’s original suggestion of having designated TOC monitors. Overall, our judgement was that adopting the SC workaround would be, in essence, removing the maintainer multi-organization requirement, and that it would be better to simply remove the requirement instead if that is the direction the TOC wishes to go. Drafted by Governance WG: Josh Berkus Dawn Foster Jennifer Davis Davinum Srinivas Paris Pittman (* by “maintainers” we mean involved, leading contributors with the authority to merge code, docs, and/or community materials into any of the key repos belonging to the project. Such contributors may be called "maintainers", "committers", or other titles. It does not refer to the official CNCF maintainer list for voting purposes, as that list contains many people who do not have merge authority in their individual projects.) -- -- Josh Berkus Kubernetes Community Red Hat OSPO |
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As an observer, I think this is a very solid analysis and recommendation. The risk of a "rubber stamp" steering committee is a serious concern, and clearly doesn't resolve the underlying challenge of meaningful corporate diversity among maintainers. That said, I do believe a standardized steering committee template has value though, especially for projects reaching the natural governance evolution where one makes sense. It's easy to forget that the Kubernetes steering committee was a response to community distress as documented in the contributor survey at the time. Having a vetted and well thought-out charter to start from can limit the time needed to resolve governance friction. Is this working group going to suggest an alternative? On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 9:59 AM Josh Berkus <jberkus@...> wrote: As promised, we had an in-depth discussion of the Steering Committee |
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Josh Berkus
On 7/9/20 10:48 AM, Jaice Singer DuMars wrote:
The template is a great idea, and we'd like to borrow that from Alexis' draft. We're creating a templates repo that projects can clone if they want to use our templates for the various requirements, including contributors.md, contributor ladder, etc. He hasn't given permission to use it though, so I may need to rewrite it from scratch. Is this working group going to suggest an alternative?If you're asking about an alternative to the "SC workaround", our recommendation would be that projects that are struggling with attracting minority-org maintainers reach out to SIG-ContribStrat and we'll work with them to make that happen. It's part of why we created the SIG. -- -- Josh Berkus Kubernetes Community Red Hat OSPO |
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alexis richardson
Folks The issue we are facing here is how to make projects, and hence the cncf, sustainable. As Quinton pointed out this requires incentives. Marketing buzz is short lived and sponsors will move on to the next thing, if there isn't an economic system to help the ecosystem. We have seen this before in various forms, including asf, esf, and openstack. Ultimately these foundations need to make it possible for enough actors to make money or it is really hard to keep going. Openstack made it too hard to differentiate. Eclipse got bogged down in tools. Apache is overrun by bureaucracy and placepeople, and is overprotective of its marks in the name of "open source". When we formed cncf we wanted something better that learned from all the prior art. CFF was quite interesting and had created terrific end user interest, but lacked diverse projects. It was basically CF plus libs and addons. CNCF is not Kubernetes plus addons. Yes k8s is our sun. But many use cases don't use or need it, and this also helps users. In addition ISVs like Hashicorp can see value for integration of their suite with multiple points in CNCF. If you look away from the bright light of k8s, you see a diverse range of projects. Many come from ISVs, and some from end users. Can i suggest that we listen to these ISVs about what works *for them* and without assuming that they want to game the system or corrupt the ideals of this foundation. Please. Alexis On Thu, 9 Jul 2020, 18:48 Jaice Singer DuMars, <jdumars@...> wrote:
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Derek Collison <derek@...>
I think as the CNCF was formed its vision was to guide an end user ecosystem and to assist projects to navigate and gain acceptance with the end users. For the end users, they look to the CNCF for guidance around which projects and technologies they should consider. In my opinion these projects should add value and solve a specific problem, be production proven, be security minded, and should minimize risk to the end user who is adopting. I believe our area of concern on graduating status and this email thread is specific to reducing risk to the end user who is adopting a technology or project. I also believe that the list I presented is in priority order, at least for me, meaning that minimizing risk is important but behind the others. Even within the risk category, I believe looking at this from an end user perspective the things they probably care about are as follows. Note this assumes basic market forces are at play and that a project is popular or applicable to a large enough audience, meaning users are voting with their feet. End user concerns around risk 1. Can I continue to use the software as I see fit (no license changes). 2. Is the software supported such that issues and/or bugs are addressed by the project. 3. If the project is missing features will the project ecosystem move forward in a way that aligns with my needs as an end user. We have #1 covered, so I believe the debate is around #2 and #3 and how the CNCF sees projects that it moves to a graduated status. This is the main issue of debate. How does the CNCF suggest end users look at #2 and #3. Right now the guidance is around a fairly specific project profile that does not take into consideration ISV led projects, and more importantly mature ISV led projects. I believe the CNCF should promote a diverse set of projects, including ones that are led by ISVs. For certain projects diverse maintainers and multi-vendor participation can help with #2 and #3, but it's not black and white by any stretch, even when the project profile aligns well. The idea of a steering committee was to see if we could help with guidance to the end user community on de-risking #2, but mostly #3 around ISV led projects. The CNCF should be seen as a good steward of the ecosystem and the things end users and project maintainers should be aware of and prioritize, but it should be careful not to be a gatekeeper. Speaking from my personal experience with NATS, I would like to see more conversation and debate on ways to support ISV projects and companies trying to make a viable business from OSS as something the CNCF wants to support. This in addition to the large multi-vendor projects like k8s. NATS is older than any other project in the CNCF, it has been downloaded over 120M times, so it has been around and even prospered as an ISV led project (although by 3 different companies now). I believe the project and ecosystem have done a good job at minimizing risk on #2 and #3 over the last decade. For #3 we have been engaging with the ecosystem and providing early access to new features through design docs and early tech previews to gain an understanding of what the end user ecosystem is interested in. That ecosystem can include other large vendors and actually does. We feel the steering committee idea could be a path forward to help formalize that part of the governance of the project and be beneficial to the end user ecosystem. For the NATS project, and for all projects, I think as issues and bugs and new features want to be added, you always want the best folks working on those problems and care should be taken to not have incentives that go against that outcome. Our end users do not want to fix bugs and code new features, they want the maintainers to do so. Note that many times this is the best use of time and financial resources for the end user. If it is not, that usually suggests a project is not being properly maintained. NATS is not open core, and we have a diverse set of contributors across the board, especially for the nearly 40 different client implementations. But we do lead development and new features for the server, but I do not think this is a bad thing and I do not believe anyone wants to game the current system to progress through the CNCF. I think a steering committee can help formalize a process for #3 to make sure that it's aligned with the ecosystem and that end users (including other vendors) are represented. In the end users will vote with their feet regardless. My hope is that ISV led projects are an important diversification for the projects that make up the CNCF and that the discussion around how best to support them through the CNCF journey continues. On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 11:04 AM alexis richardson <alexis@...> wrote:
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Matt Klein
Thanks Alexis for this doc. Overall I am supportive and I think for some projects this is a good tool to have that will aid in graduation. The one part that I am most concerned about is the section on continuity planning. My personal view is that some projects that may wish to use the steering committee to satisfy graduation requirements may not be able to produce a realistic continuity plan. This will clearly end up being a subjective assessment of the TOC to some extent, but I think we should try to have very clear guidance on what a valid continuity plan would look like as a graduation requirement. Thanks, Matt On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 2:50 PM alexis richardson <alexis@...> wrote: Hi all |
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alexis richardson
Matt Thank you for the feedback and for reviewing the proposal. I agree that the doc is light on continuity details. We have a lot of prior art on projects that face growth challenges but very little on the end state in 'bad' cases. I think it is best to talk through scenarios live. Unfortunately(*) I am on zoomcation till month end but could join a toc call in August. Until then we have email.... Alexis *Fortunately On Wed, 15 Jul 2020, 17:57 Matt Klein, <mattklein123@...> wrote:
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