Candidate "areas" for TSC and Community Committee

[mhdawson]

I think the role of the TSC and Community Committee's can be to help enable work in the key areas that are important to the success of node. This is an attempt at putting together a starting list of these areas.

In the regular meetings we should review these periodically to make sure things are on track and progressing. If they are not then we should work to identify solutions and find people who can help out in order to get them back on track. In some cases there are working groups that align with these. In that case the role would be to provide resources/help when needed to the working group.

For some I've included some of the things we might want to track/discussion on a regular basis.

An incomplete starting list in no particular order is:

• Releases

  • LTS and Current releases
  • Install experience
  • Platforms
  • OS support
  • hardware support
  • Metrics
  • Integration with Distros

• Build

  • Infrastructure
  • Dependencies

• Test

• Documentation

  • accessibility
  • translations

• Dependencies

  • V8
  • gyp
  • openssl 1.2

• Internationalization

  • ICU support
  • Messages

• Performance/Benchmarking

  • monitoring
  • startup time through snapshots

• Diagnostics and Post Mortem

  • Promises/post-mortem
  • trace adoption

• Security

  • nsp donation
  • core vulnerability reporting

• Communication

  • Website
  • irc
  • moderation

• Community enablement

  • education
  • code and learn
  • travel funding
  • inclusivity

• Roadmap

  • New features
  • Async Hooks
  • N-API
  • HTTP2
  • Modules
  • Release themes ?

• JavaScript Evolution

  • TC 39 representation
  • incoming features
  • modules

• Module ecosystem

• User representation

  • Communication channels
  • Capturing feedback

• Leadership development

  • Identifying emerging leaders, finding opportunities for them in the project, mentoring

[mikeal]

TC 39 representation

I'm going to describe the current situation here because it isn't well understood or documented and as I'm preparing to leave it's important that other people know what to do here.

First of all, we don't have a membership in TC39 and, for a variety of reasons I won't get into in detail, we can't really get one.

However, the JS Foundation does have a membership and we have an agreement with them since we often represent the same community. Essentially, the JS Foundation is willing to send people from the Node.js community to TC39 under their membership given the following conditions:

• They are representing the project and not their employer.
• Their employer is not a member of TC39 (these companies are responsible for managing their own representation and have their own IP agreements with ECMA we cannot circumvent).
• The Node.js Foundation pays their expenses (the JS Foundation has a fund to send people representing them but when we send people we need to cover their expenses).

Those are the rules but there are also some sensitivities that we need to be aware of. These organizations are setup to manage IP concerns, anti-trust concerns, and a whole host of other problems related to corporations cooperating with each other. Individuals from communities throw a bit of wrench in that equation, as do "member organizations" like us and the JS Foundation. For one thing, you could easily see how a member organization could be used as a way for companies to circumvent the IP arrangement and membership dues by having their own member org become a member of ECMA. This means that people from big companies that probably should be members of ECMA but aren't should probably not be sent if we can avoid it. People employed at small companies, students and digital nomads are all ideal representatives.

It's also worth noting that sending people through this relationship is not the only way we have improved our representation in TC39. We've also increased the number of Node.js contributors at member organizations like Google and IBM attending. GoDaddy actually went out and bought a TC39 membership to send Bradley and I'd love to see other members stepping up in a similar fashion.

In addition to all of these mechanisms, TC39 members can invite subject matter experts to attend meetings. There is a cap on how many meetings you can attend as an invited guest but this is a great way to get a community member that is an expert on something into a meeting where that subject is going to be discussed.

My recommendation would be to create a working group that handles the intricacies of how to send people. I think this group should also pull in contributors attending on behalf of their employers so that it can think strategically about how to do what is best for Node.js and the Node.js Community. It takes a lot of work to get some of this stuff over the finish line and the more coordination we have the better.

[mhdawson]

Added leadership development.

[gr2m]

travel fund discussion issue: https://github.com/nodejs/community-committee/issues/82

[bnb]

An additional candidate area:

• The Node.js Collection

  • Finding and enabling new technical editors
  • Sharing that technical editors are always welcome and needed

• Website

  • Updated website design and work needed (seems the new design work has been stalled for over a year: https://github.com/nodejs/nodejs.org-new/issues/4)

[gr2m]

as discussed in today’s CommComm meeting, treating this issue as brainstorming would suggest to add Contributor Onboarding & Meassurements to the list

[Trott]

Contributor Onboarding & Meassurements

Can you elaborate on what you mean by measurements?

[gr2m]

I’d like to measure metrics that would qualify as contribution. Based on these, I’d like to measure new contributors / active contributors / becoming inactive contributors per time frame. Once we measure these things and have some historic data, we can try different interventions and will know if they actually improve our on-boarding and retention of contributors.

[jasnell]

does this need to remain open?

[mhdawson]

Yes, I'll think of some more concrete suggestions of how we proceed and then bring back to TSC discussion.

[littledan]

For TC39 membership: I've been really happy with the recent attendance of a number of Node folks in TC39, and think they've brought some really valuable contributions. As Mike mentions, there are various ways that people can join or attend occasionally. It can be a bit daunting, though. Please contact me if any core Node contributors would like to attend TC39 and are having trouble figuring out the logistics.

[dshaw]

@mhdawson I think there’s merit in having the TSC consider explicitly empowering members who are on TC39 to liaise on the TSC’s behalf.

One way to frame this would be JavaScript Ecosystem compatibility, rather than limiting the scope to TC39 exclusively.

The work product of that effort could be a body of tests that ensure compatibility.

[ljharb]

I’m also happy to help facilitate node involvement and representation in TC39 any way I can.

[MylesBorins]

Since the initial copy related to this has landed I've removed the review labels and am going to close this issue. If this is a mistake please feel free to reverse everything I've done.

[mhdawson]

I still think we have gaps in a lot of the areas mentioned, but I'm willing to leave as is for a while to see how we get on with the current strategic initiatives and then re-open the discussion.