Update from the Steering Committee for December 2019

Published on: 2019-12-18

Early last week, the Knative Steering Committee met in person for an all-day working session to deliver on our promise to restructure project governance. While there was plenty of healthy debate, the result was consensus that all committee members felt positive about. It will take some time to work through all the details, but we wanted to share the broad strokes of our discussions with the community. Feedback is not just welcome, but required, as we will be iterating on these topics in the coming months and your voice is critical to our collective success.

Key takeaways from the steering meeting are:

• We have defined the project’s values that we want the community to uphold, and used these values as we adjusted governance of the project:
  • We welcome all skills
  • We recognize all contributions
  • We value transparency and visibility
  • We focus on what is right for our users
  • We value feedback
• The Steering Committee will make adjustments to provide the opportunity for wider inclusion. This concretely translates to opening additional seats providing end-user and community voices a place in the discussion. The details will be shaped over the coming weeks.
• We will be creating a comprehensive contribution ladder that defines how contributors can become eligible for every role in the project.
  • The community needs many kinds of contributions to be successful. We will recognize contributors with defined roles. With that in mind we will update our project roles as follows:
    • Create an opportunity for workgroup leadership by both technical and non-technical individuals, who can focus on different elements of running a workgroup (technical specialization and organizational specialization).
    • Create a scribe role, which recognizes individuals who write notes from WGs. This is in line with our transparency value and recognizing non-technical contributions.
    • Create a mentor/sponsor role which is open to any approver or lead interested in mentoring new members in the community. Mentorship is open to anyone and we especially wish to encourage participation from underrepresented groups. This is in line with our Welcoming value.
• We will write up answers to the questions asked in the December 9th Steering Committee AMA to over time build up a FAQ we can refer to in the future.
• Finally, we discussed having a one-day event for the community and our users. For this to be successful we will need the community to submit presentations so we would like to gauge interest for something like that this winter.

We will be working to finalize the details of these topics in the coming weeks and will provide updates and PRs as we make progress. Even though the details are not yet finalized, the Steering Committee members all felt that it was important to share the broad strokes with the community as soon as possible.