2019 04 04 TSC minutes

(7:00am - 8:00am PT)

via Zoom

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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

  • Learning materials working group is being rebooted.
    • Bobbi Muscara sent out a survey on the chair elections.
    • Looking for better involvement from the other teams.
    • Trying to outline best practices around developing learning materials.
    • Trying to build a resource library to store the vetted documentation on training and tutorial information for the Hyperledger projects.
    • Primary goal is to make good onboarding documentation that gets new users up the learning curve quickly.
    • Need to identify people to maintain the documentation.
    • Looking to get universities more involved.
    • Building a resource page where each framework and tool will have a section with the best documentation for that framework and tool.
    • Hopefully whomever is working on the documentation in each project should join the learning materials wg so that there is better coordination and best practices can be developed.
  • CI/CD committee
    • spinning up a committee to create a CI/CD recommendation for the TSC.
    • committee has a deadline of early-to-mid june.
    • goal is to create a recommendation for the TSC that addresses the needs of the teams.
    • looking for volunteers.

Items of discussion

  • We're starting to see declining attendance numbers across all of our meetings and we should discuss strategies for reversing that trend. Mark has added a backlog agenda item for overall engagement in projects for discussion in mid-april.
  • Chris: a proposal sent to the TSC last night for adopting a translation solution that was reviewed in the Fabric maintainers call yesterday and it seems reasonable. Can we make a deal with the company to get it for free since we're open source.
  • Silona: I didn't see anything on their website about offering licenses to open source projects.
  • Chris: I think we just need to contact them.

Quarterly updates

  • Ursa
    • Silas: Ursa was originally designed to have tiered classifications of implementations. There are purely Rust implementations of some crypto, but wondering what level of trust we are assigning to those implementations.
    • Hart: The crypto community is moving toward creating secure Rust implementations of algorithms. The prospect of creating pure Rust implementations is preferable.
    • Dan: The implementations of crypto were meant to be the most trusted implementations we know of, not just purely Rust implementations. For secp256k1 should be linked to the bitcoin implementation.
    • Silas: Are you saying that both are actually available.
    • Hart: We have RFCs for the configuration system. You will be able to use whichever implementation you want with a simple configuration change.
    • Mark: Dave sent out an article saying that Rust is not as safe as people think.
    • Dave: I haven't read the article in particular. I still have the greatest confidence in Rust.
    • Dan: I thought he sent it out.
    • Dave: I sent it out? I did?
    • Dan: With Rust it is common for lots of things to go through the FFI and that lets unsafe things to sneak into Rust.
    • Dave: I did send out an article about FFI and how that is hard to get right. Rust guarantees only go out to the FFI boundary but there are new strategies out of Mozilla security that address these concerns.
    • Dan: We should have well-informed requirements that help guide our API and FFI implementations to maximize safety.
  • Fabric
    • Silona: let's be careful about doing the Fabric update now when it isn't in the agenda.
    • Chris:
      • Published the RC for 1.4.1 and should be finalized next week.
        • Includes the RAFT consensus implementation which reduces latency.
      • Increased the diversity of maintainers because a few IBM maintainers have been retired and one has left IBM for another company.
      • Things are going smoothly with substantive improvements coming from outside of IBM.
      • Expect to have 2.0 alpha RC released by next week.
        • Inviting people to try it out.

Upcoming items

  • Project Readiness for 1.0 (Dave Huseby, April 11th)

Backlog

  • Ambassadors reboot (Silona Bonewald, postponed - waiting on contractor)
  • Overall Engagement in Projects (Mark Wagner, Ry Jones, mid-April)
  • Translation solution (Chris Ferris)

Recordings