2019 02 07 TSC Minutes

Owned by Ry Jones
Oct 01, 2019
5 min read

February 07, 2019 (7:00am - 8:00am PT)

via Zoom

TSC Members

Present?

  • Arnaud Le Hors
  • Baohua Yang
  • Binh Nguyen
  • Christopher Ferris
  • Dan Middleton
  • Hart Montgomery
  • Kelly Olson
  • Mark Wagner
  • Mic Bowman
  • Nathan George
  • Silas Davis

Resources:



Announcements

  • Still looking for mentors for the summer internship program.
    • Intern applications will happen next month.
  • Propose a new internship project here.
  • Quilt architecture regroup process started yesterday.
    • Quilt meetings are on the calendar.
  • Tracy Kuhrt is leaving us. Her last day is the 12th.
    • She's staying on as a Labs steward.
    • Lots of thanks Tracy!!

Quarterly updates

Fabric

  • 2019 Q1 Hyperledger Fabric Update
  • First long-term support (LTS), version 1.4 was released in early January.
    • Coming soon: 1.41, fixes for the LTS.
    • Coming soon: 2.0, new features.
  • Overall health:
    • Still very popular
    • Contributors numbers are stable
  • Recent presentation at Univ. of Waterloo
    • Started with 3.5k tx/sec and with optimizations increased that to 20k tx/sec.
    • Open source works well. Despite all of the work so far, a researcher came in and drastically improved performance.
  • One issue is that non-regular-contributors submit PRs but they are having difficulty getting them reviewed.
    • Maintainers and contributors have had discussions about it.
    • There's a RocketChat channel #fabric-pr-review is for asking for reviews.
    • Automating PR review nagging of maintainers.
    • Any PR's that don't get responses from the submitters will be archived.
    • Any PR's tied to a JIRA will not close JIRA ticket if PR gets archived.
  • Brian suggests
    • In a move from 1.x to 2.x we are tolerant of backwards compatibility
    • Fabric should make some moves to interop more.
  • Fabric project is looking forward to Ursa and to Burrow integration.
  • Fabric and Burrow integration resulted in mutual bug discoveries and fixes.

Indy

  • 2019 Q1 Hyperledger Indy Update
  • Lots of growth.
    • Two new use cases are live on Sovrin mainnet.
      • 2M credentials in production.
    • Agent side of codebase is growing most.
      • Lots of standards work around edge protocols and specifications.
  • Sovrin Provo, UT Office is hosting agent connect-a-thon February 19-22.
    • Organizations from all over the world coming together to test agent-to-agent communications.
  • Lots of stability changes in main ledger.
  • Lots of changes in SDK.
    • Next release is 1.8.
    • Release of 2.0 will have new wallet features and will use Hyperledger Ursa.
      • Expected before next quarterly report.
      • The new design work for 2.0 is already underway.
  • Indy is moving over to Hyperledger Ursa for crypto abstraction.
  • Have not completed all of the CII badge requirements.
    • However all of the changes have been merged, but infrastructure issues are slowing things down.
  • Project Health
    • One maintainer has shifted away, however new contributors and maintainers have joined to fill in.
    • Indy Catalyst has moved towards the main codebase.
    • Reaching out to Streetcred group to coordinate agent work with their .Net implementations.
  • Proposing a new wallet codebase as new project that will lead to cross-ledger compatibility.
    • Project proposal is being drafted now.
    • Expected after release of Indy based on Ursa.
  • Been moving build infrastructure out of Evernym.
    • Some trouble moving to Hyperledger infrastructure is difficult, especially with Android and iOS build support.
    • Hyperledger Ursa CI/CD fixes should help with Hyperledger Indy migration.
  • Working with Sawtooth team to coordinate cooperation so that interop can increase.
  • Questions:
    • What are the greatest challenges that the Indy team is facing that the HL staff could help fix?
      • The build infrastructure seems very focused on Fabric.
      • The Ursa build work is shifting that somewhat.
      • There are a lot of client build requirements which presents a challenge.
      • Thank you Tracy and Ry working with the Indy team getting them through issues.
      • Turn-around time is slow while working out mismatches in requirements.
    • Done a good job at bringing in outside contributors. How much time does the Indy team spend on recruiting additional contributors?
      • Is it worth it? Yes, spending time recruiting has yielded success.
      • The team has also experienced PRs from new contributors stalling, like Fabric.
      • Spending time on getting new contributors introduced and plugged in seems to help.
      • Nathan estimates that he spends about 20% of time recruiting.
      • Sovrin developers focus on building developers moreso than building code.
      • Maintainers spending 20-30% of time recruiting new contributors seems like the minimum. –Brian
    • Does Indy/Sovrin host a user-focused call around users of the platform?
      • Have had a call in the past.
      • It has shifted to be more offline recently.
      • Several companies in consulting ecosystem are doing consulting.
      • Working to resurrect user-facing support and educational materials and training opportunities in healthcare/financial/government verticals.
    • Is the user-facing coordination happening through Sovrin?
      • A lot of it is.
      • Hyperledger also serves as an important platform for doing the coordination.

Items of discussion

  • How we are going to handle quarterly updates going forward?

    • Offline discussion about having TSC members read the quarterly updates offline.
    • Should the TSC meetings just be for questions about the updates?
    • Having updates on confluence where they can be commented on is nice.
      • Flagging for discussion should be done on the confluence.
      • Can subscribe to the page to get notifications about edits.
    • Should we enforce reading of the updates with checkmarks/+1 on the reports.
      • Let's not assume that silence equals consent on the updates.
    • Apache Foundation reads updates ahead of time and each board member +1's the updates to accept them.
    • The idea is to be more efficient with everybody's time in the meetings.
    • Maybe limit the updates in the meeting to just notable details instead of a complete readout.
    • Conclusion: 
      • Checkboxes on the future updates so that TSC members can signal they have read and approve of the update.
      • Topics for further discussion to be marked with comments on the quarterly update page in confluence.
      • People will still give updates but limit it to just notable highlights.
  • Working to get learning materials group rebooted.
    • Old chair has walked away for another job.
    • New chair is slowly taking over.
    • The TSC will have to approve the new chair.
    • How do we get the other projects to send representatives to working group to keep our materials up-to-date.
    • The new working group is trying to be more meta-level that keeps an eye on what's going on with all of the projects and curating best practices.
    • The wiki section for this group has be refreshed with the new direction.
  • Hong Kong Bootcamp
    • Extremely popular, had to shut off registration.
    • Session proposals are coming in.
    • Indy is trying to create bootcamp materials that are reusable for future bootcamps.
  • Contributors' Summit
    • Still trying to find locations and dates. Looking in Canada in September or October.
    • Questions:
      • Will the Contributors' Summit be linked up with the General Members' Summit?
        • No, not currently. We want to space them out so that we have three big events: Contributors' Summit, Members' Summit, and Global Forum.
      • When are other bootcamps are happening?
        • Denver, Canadian Government, Defcon in August/September
        • Hoping that India and Brazil bootcamps happen sooner.
        • There is concern that we have no technical events on the calendar until the fall.
        • Conclusion:
          • Taking it offline to see what can be done about having a sooner technical event.
          • Let's see if we can do a technical event in Japan adjacent to the Members' Summit.
  • (Backlog) Fabric Desktop proposal
    • The proposal is going to be brought to the Fabric maintainers.
  • (Backlog) The role of Labs Stewards Sponsors
    • The proposal for definition needs to be brought to the TSC mailing list.
    • It was originally sent to the TSC but the action item was to keep discussing it and bring it up at a later date.
    • What is expected exactly of sponsors? Potential sponsors were unsure what was expected of them.
    • Should they be technical people engaged with the project?
    • Conclusion:
      • A sponsors are an initial gating factor in proposal acceptance. They review the lab to make sure it meets the criteria and that its scope is right.
      • We need to record the role definition and approve it by TSC.
  • (Backlog) Still waiting for submittal of Project from DPU interop Requestion

Upcoming items

Backlog

Empty. (Yay!)

Recordings