Indy Annual Review 2024 Notes

Project Health

Overall, the project is in good health as indicated in the review and by looking at the insights
There's a lot of community interest and participation, as indicated by the Discord activity
Production usage is significant (e.g., govt. of BC, govt. agency in India)
The community of contributors and orgs is active and diverse, but there is still significant skew (almost 50% activity from a single maintainer, almost 60% from a single org). Maintainers should strive to distribute workload more, and ensure that there are no "critical" contributors, whose absence could derail maintenance of key features.

Recent Maintenance Activity and Progress

As the review indicates, PRs are fewer. This is understandable when the product is mature and is largely in maintenance mode rather than in feature development mode. (Could this also be because there is more "code" per PR?)
Tasks listed in the roadmap are being fulfilled over time.
Question about roadmap: why is this hosted on an external site and also not linked from any of the project repos' READMEs?

Compliance with Hyperledger Project Lifecycle Criteria

All the criteria are fulfilled with no red flags
Should remain in Graduated status

Suggestions for Improvement

Manage churn from massive refactoring in a better way, ensuring stability and usability
Strive to keep documentation and upgrade guidelines for both users and contributors as fresh as possible, and display prominently to avoid basic inquiries on communication channels
There doesn't seem to be a well-advertized process for new feature proposal and brainstorming, say using RFCs. For a project of this stature, brainstorming only during the maintainers' calls (including having to listen to past recordings) seems to be inadequate in my opinion.
Maintain a roadmap file in at least one of the main repos rather than hosting it externally.

General Recommendations

Continue to pursue synergies with other projects, like Aries and Besu. Avoid reinventing the wheel and leverage dependencies instead, keeping the code as modular as possible. (The project has done a good job of this so far!)
Create an Indy ecosystem page similar to the Fabric ecosystem page (https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/fabric/Ecosystem). This would be helpful to the community, as currently it is hard for newbies to understand how all the Indy repos (let alone Aries, or Besu) complement each other.
Write blog articles and run workshops periodically with Hyperledger staff's help
Keep connections with the W3C standardization community and strive for compliance with those standards
Figure out an ideal longer-term vision and roadmap, focusing on what is valuable about Indy. Also factor in the number of knowledgeable maintainers available and interests of the community (more around decentralized identity and credentials rather than distributed ledger architecture).
Identify real priorities that can be fulfilled along with ensuring maintainer diversity. Peg supporting features that are somewhat dormant (i.e., the Indy ledger) to other active projects (e.g., the current Indy-Besu effort to use a Besu ledger for purposes that Indy was originally intended for.)

swcurran commented 6 months ago

@tkuhrt — I think the feedback should be included in the PR and so will be putting in another PR to do so. Or do you think that is a bad idea? I think the feedback will be lost if just left here. I also plan to add the link to the TOC discussion into the report.

tkuhrt commented 6 months ago

I am wondering how to best capture this information as well. Whatever we decide on, we should do for each of the reports.