Maintainers meeting : 30 May 2024

[orville-wright]

CNCF Re-apply to project

---

MAINTAINERS weekly Review & Planning meeting

1. Review Community Project : https://github.com/orgs/openebs/projects/54

   • Add any new line items / Issues
   • Update actions , deliverables and achievements.

2. Major slippages :

   • Does anyone know of any conflicts that will generate major schedule slippage.

3. Need final decision

   • RawFile vote
     • Will RawFile be onboarded into the OpenEBS org as a core Storage Engine
     • Create or update ISSUEs to track all info, notes and decisions
   • Is OpenEBS re-applying as SANDBOX or INCUBATION ?
     • Maintainers need to make their decision for the Org/Project on behalf of CNCF

4. Need Discussion & decision

   • Governance doc changes
     • How to evaluate, vote, onboard an EXTERNAL Project into the OpenEBS org
     • Definition: What is an External Project (i.e. an adopted non-citizen not natively born from OpenEBS) and what are the native born first-class org citizen components
     • Procedure to update Governance docs
   • The daily operating methodology of a Maintainer: @edrob999 proposal for consideration
   • Maintainer Veto powers : @orville-wright and @edrob999 brainstormed this
   • Special Maintainer status : needed or not ?
   • Product Telemetry, Metrics and Analytics
   • Final review of where we are, go-forward strategy and recommendation. @edrob999 to give update
   • Maintainers and Community Meeting
     • Meeting Agenda and minutes (same format for both Maintainers and Community) ?

5. Blockers

   • Feedback on re-apply application from major project sponsor (DataCore). Cannot move forward to re-apply without receiving this.

6. Issues & Concerns

   • The README.md files of each of the 5 Core Storage Parent Repos are very old & need major refresh before CNCF re-apply. We've only focused on the repos: openebs, openebs/openebs and openebs/community. The rest need to be done.
   • Weekly Repo ISSUE management
     • Weekly triage, curation and grooming) horizontally across all 5 main Repos
     • How best to do this
     • Currently we have ISSUES that are 3 YEARS OLD. This wont pass scrutiny of the TOC CNCF Re-apply review

Thanks,
~@orville-wright
Dave Brace

[tiagolobocastro]

Minutes from the second Half of the meeting (first half captured by Ed, will be added TBD):

• Maintainers meeting
  • Starting with a weekly cadence during CNCF Reboot
  • Will be held on Wednesdays at 14:00 UTC Time, but it's not set in stone.
  • An Agenda needs to be curated during the week and ready by Monday/Tuesday
  • The Agenda is to be added as Discussions on the Community Repo
  • The Minutes shall be added as comments
  • Video Platform will be GoogleMeet
    • Either we'll create a gmail openebs or use google groups?
    • Seems [email protected] already exists, whom does this belong to?
• Community meeting
• Held once a month but on a different day to the Maintainers meeting
• Will be held on Thursdays at 14:00 UTC Time
• Agenda and Minutes similar to Maintainer Meeting
• Enhancement proposals should be raised against the openebs/openebs repo, rather than the openebs/community repo
• A new RawFile issue is to be created to discuss the RawFile Project within OpenEBS

[orville-wright]

I've sent an email to the [email protected] account asking if the owner is associated with the CNCF GitHub project.
Hopefully we get a reply.

[orville-wright]

Additional minutes as recorded by Me @orville-wright, ... while all other Maintainers were providing their detailed feedback and comments on key Maintainer questions.

1. Maintainers open to consider using more openebs accessible public community tools to manage the project

   • Google, Zoom, Hackmd.io and/or other public tools rather than tools that are difficult for community to access (e.g. JIRA, Confluence etc).
   • We want to make it easier for the openEBS community to participate and contribute

2. The path to being promoted to a Maintainer should be well understood and more democratized

   • It's a little difficult based on the current Governance guidelines that are heavily centered around Technical Code contributions, which is quite difficult to become proficient in due to the complexity of the product, codebase, technology and where/how the supporting tech docs/info is managed. We may need a better way to enable this for community members who aspire a path to Maintainer-ship.

3. Maintainers operate in multiple organization roles and responsibilities. This is time consuming and a lot to manage. Maintainers need to find a healthy way to manage this complexity.

4. Maintainers should attend other CNCF project meetings as Guest Maintainers to observe and learn how other CNCF projects run their orgs/projects. We need to learn how to be good maintainers by learning from example of our peers.

   • example CNCF projects are: Longhorn, KubeVirt, CubeFS, CSI Group, TAG Storage, Kubernetes, CNCF TOC

[edrob999]

Notes from Maintainers Meeting
30-May-2024, 7am Pacific time, edrob999
(sorry I write these notes quite formally. Sadly, I've spend a lot of my life in board meetings)

The maintainers spent the meeting discussing how to improve the maintainer process.

Issues and Decisions:
Issues
Issue: Maintainers recognize they're not exposing enough roadmap information, for features core team is working on
Issue: Maintainer role is not democratized, needs to be open to anyone, and how do maintainers quantify who will be the right candidate? Maintainers recognized OpenEBS has plenty of talented engineers contributing code, but the project needs governance/project skills, and this need is probably an issue for many CNCF projects. There was agreement project needs a more formal path-to-maintainer
Issue: Contributing code has a barrier to entry. Not enough design documents, complicated domain
Issue: Maintainers openly wondered "Are we following an open process for adding a feature?, should we be seeking more community input?"

Decisions
Decision: Maintainers were unified "we must start improving", and this starts with having open meetings.
Decision: Maintainers will meet very Tuesday, and minute the meetings (well, not true minutes, more like rough notes, but its a start)
Decision: Once a month, the meeting will be open to anyone in the community to join. First one will be on/about June 25th
Decision: Project will use the best toolset for running + documenting meetings, and the one most people are familiar with. Probably Google Meet at this time

[orville-wright]

After much deliberation, it was decided that the Weekly Maintainers Meeting will be moved to Wednesday at 07:00am PDT.

• This give the maintainers time to set the agenda by COB Monday

The new Wednesday meeting will be converged with the CNCF Re-Apply meeting. (so CNCF Re-apply + Maintainers meeting)

• While we are still in the transition phase of re-applying to CNCF, this meeting will remain Weekly
• Once we return into CNCF, this meeting will be re-titled as a Maintainers only meeting
• @avishnu proposed that the Maintainers meeting be held only once-every 2 weeks, instead of Weekly (after the project successfully re-levels to Sandbox/.Incubation
  • No decision
  • This proposal will be re-visited after we successfully re-join CNCF

[niladrih]

Newer maintainers' meeting details are available at https://github.com/openebs/community/discussions/categories/weekly-maintainers-meetings.