[Governance Review]: cert-manager

maelvls commented 1 month ago

Project Name

cert-manager

Project Website

https://cert-manager.io

Contact Details 1

@maelvls

Contact Details 2

@SgtCoDFish

Links to communication channels

https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/CDEQJ0Q8M (channel cert-manager-dev in the Kubernetes Slack)

Reason for governance review request

Application for moving levels from Incubation to Graduation

Are there any sub-projects, plugins, and related?

The project includes the following notable sub-projects:

Governance model

Our governance model is inspired from the CNCF template Maintainer Council with the addition of a steering committee made of end-users and (soon to be elected) maintainers.

The idea behind the steering committee is to counter-balance the fact that all the current maintainers are either employed by the same vendor or ex-employees of that same vendor.

Governance documents

https://github.com/cert-manager/community/blob/main/STEERING.md https://github.com/cert-manager/community/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md https://github.com/cert-manager/community/blob/main/maintainers.csv

Governance Execution Examples

The biweekly dev meeting recordings are available on the cert-manager YouTube channel.

The quarterly steering committee recordings are listed under "Past Meetings" in the STEERING.md page.

Votes from maintainers:

Promotion of a contributor: https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/CDEQJ0Q8M/p1714386002098739 (lazy consensus among maintainers)
Demotion of a maintainer: https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/CDEQJ0Q8M/p1676385659296399 (I don't think there was a vote, though)
Vote of the governance charter: https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/CDEQJ0Q8M/p1692628377977769 (lazy consensus)

Discussions with the steering committee:

Moving from a 2-months to a 4-months release cadence: https://github.com/cert-manager/community/blob/main/STEERING.md#meeting-1-2024-05-09

Governance Evolution

We haven't made adjustments to the steering committee charter nor the governance charter yet.

Any specific aspects of your governance structure are you seeking feedback on?

We would like to receive feedback on the way we intend to balance the fact that most of the maintainers are employed by the same vendor. What do you think about our steering committee model? The concern is that we haven't found a good way to give the steering committee a good amount of ownership and power over the project.

Do you have any concerns or specific areas where you feel your governance could be improved?

We have discussed multiple concerns over the past 6 months:

Concerns over the fact that the steering committee meetings might not "do anything" and end up not happening after the first iteration.

Additional notes and resources

On 3 May 2024, we had an initial meeting with TAG Contributor Strategy: https://github.com/cert-manager/community/issues/14#issuecomment-2092792870

Josh and Dawn (TAG contributor strategy) said that they didn't realize that cert-manager had been able to get a maintainer from outside Venafi. To them, it showed that the cert-manager project has a "path" for people to become maintainers, which was the main concern they had coming to the meeting.
To the question "what power do we give to steering committee members?", steering the roadmap is a power we can give. No need to find other areas (such as branding, conformance tests, etc as mentioned previously) to give to steering committee.
The main concern around the roadmap (and why it's good to have a steering committee to have power on) is that Venafi's roadmap and cert-manager's roadmap may be confused as the same. The project needs its own roadmap, separate from Venafi's.
A good read to build a vendor-neutral open roadmap: https://contribute.cncf.io/maintainers/community/contributor-growth-framework/open-source-roadmaps/ written by Riaan Kleinhans.
Riaan is a technical project manager who offered help in implementing the project board roadmap.
The first steering committee meeting will take place on 9 May 2024. Erik, one of the members of the steering committee, said he was very interested to work on the roadmap during that meeting. I'll report back here once it's done.

Meeting notes: here. Recording: https://youtu.be/wWiCZDKN27Y?si=TEYm5E-IP4XiGt7Y.

jberkus commented 1 month ago

I've started on this review.

/assign

SgtCoDFish commented 1 month ago

Thanks Josh! If you need anything from us don't hesitate to ask and we'll do everything we can 😁

SgtCoDFish commented 3 weeks ago

Hey @jberkus - thanks again for looking into this!

I'm just wondering about the timeline for this? Not trying to rush you at all - I know we're all busy! My question mainly comes from this being one of the last things we need before going to a public comment period, and we're really hoping to get graduated before KubeCon NA if at all possible so the timelines are getting tighter for us.

As above, if there's anything we can do that would be helpful we'd be glad to help!

jberkus commented 3 weeks ago

I'm planning to finish it this week. Your setup is pretty straightforwards, it's just a question of available time.

SgtCoDFish commented 3 weeks ago

Thanks very much Josh, appreciate it! 👍

jberkus commented 3 weeks ago

Draft is done, see link.

cncf / tag-contributor-strategy