Community Health Task Force Rough Draft

Owned by Ry Jones
Last updated: Apr 02, 2019 by Silona Bonewald
4 min read

This is the documentation of the method by which we will assess and report Hyperledger's community health.

The original proposal is here. Text of original proposal:


Hyperledger Community Improvement Task Force Charter v.2

Changelog

Several changes have been made to this document to address the feedback given during the TSC discussion on August 30.  To help make it easier to compare this version of the doc with the earlier version, we’re providing some notes about the biggest changes:

  • The introduction has been rewritten to focus on how this proposal is about providing extra bandwidth to projects and working groups that want to work on improving participation and engagement.  

  • The role of metrics has been clarified.  Metrics will be used as one of the tools to improve participation, but producing metrics is not the goal of the group or the main work product.  Metrics will also not be published for a project or a working group unless that group is interested in the data and would find it useful to add to their existing reporting.

  • As mentioned in some comments in this document, perhaps this group shouldn’t be set up as a Working Group.  We’ve left this as a Working Group proposal since there isn’t an established Task Force or alternative structure.  Another alternative is to not formally create this group, but simply gather people together who are interested in this work and coordinate our efforts.  We can sort out what this group is at the next TSC discussion.

Introduction

This working group will provide an open forum for people with expertise in participating in open source projects to work together to support the Hyperledger community.  The focus of the group will be to better understand what is working well and to more broadly distribute that knowledge. Learning about what works will be done by analyzing existing participation and by working with interested projects and working groups to try out ideas and see how that improves participation.

Scope

The scope of the working group includes:

  • Experimenting with best practices to increase community health and viability.  

    • This group will itself be a testbed to try out best practices and the group will also be a resource that others can tap into if they also want to try out best practices.  For instance, if a group feels like their regular calls might be limiting participation then this group can work with them to try alternative approaches, such as alternating call times or trying asynchronous communication methods.

  • Analyzing existing participation in the community to understand what is currently working well and what might not be working well.  

    • Some of this analysis will involve defining a set of metrics that can be used to better understand activities that are happening.  These metrics might be a useful addition to regular reports that projects and WGs provide to the TSC that offer more rigor and an ability to establish and track trendlines.

    • This analysis should also include understanding the diversity of our community.

Work Products

The anticipated initial work products will include (but is not limited to):

  • A series of participation experiments that will be conducted and reports on the effectiveness of those changes will be published.

  • A set of metrics that will be used to assess a healthy community will be published.  These metrics would be available for projects and working groups that would like to add them to their regular reports to the TSC.  These metrics will not duplicate existing quarterly project and working group reports and will not be published for a project or a working group unless the leads for those efforts would like to have that information.

  • A set of community best practices that will be documented and will be available as a resource for others to make use of

  • Active discussions and recommendations about how to address areas of concern that come up in the reports

Collaborators (other groups)

This Working Group will collaborate with other Hyperledger working groups, the TSC, Linux Foundation staff, and the project maintainers.  We also want to learn from and leverage work that other open source communities are doing around community health, so this group will also collaborate with CHAOSS and other open-source projects.

Interested Parties

The following individuals have already expressed an interest in joining this working group, and we hope they will become contributors over the first year:

  • David Boswell, Hyperledger

  • Ry Jones, Hyperledger

  • Tracy Kuhrt, Hyperledger

  • Mark Wagner, Red Hat

  • Dan Middleton, Intel

  • Mandy Olund, Intel

  • Elias Haase, B9 Lab

  • Karen Ottoni, Hyperledger

  • Karsten Wade, Red Hat

  • Nadine Augusta, DTCC

Proposed Chair

The following individual has volunteered to serve as the initial Chair for the working group:

Usually this is the person who has been most active in encouraging the development of the working group.  The Chair will kick off the discussions and work products, as well as, manage the tone and cadence of conversations. The TSC will appoint a chair along with the approval of the working group.


Notes from Silona:

Do they have getting started? contribute? what is their status?
Are people onboarding
LF Analytics status?
Bitergia Grimoire - setup? Demo for labs. Someone else owns the Hyperledger space
When starting a project - what are the first steps?
Plan due on what date? 
Code churn numbers for security audits