TSC Chair - Election?

[mkdolan]

Hi @nodejs/tsc, I wanted to check in on the status of selecting a TSC Chair would would also participate on the Node.js Foundation Board. The TSC Chair's role is helpful for keeping the Board up to date on what's going on in the technical community, keeping the Board honest on any expectations, bringing technical community concerns or questions to the Board and being the interface between both groups. I heard via email that Rod and Bert were potential candidates but haven't heard anything further. Would it be possible to decide soon? The Board Officer elections were schedule to kickoff tomorrow after the Gold and Silver Director elections end. If we can assist from the LF by setting up an anonymous email election or other process, we'd be happy to do so.

[jasnell]

​We can queue this up for discussion on next week's TSC call but the consensus after the last time it was discussed was that Rod and Bert would share the responsibility of representing the TSC for the near term. If we need to pick just one, then I'd be inclined to invite the two of them to decide between themselves (paper rock scissors anyone?).​

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 2:54 PM, Mike Dolan notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi @nodejs/tsc https://github.com/orgs/nodejs/teams/tsc, I wanted to check in on the status of selecting a TSC Chair would would also participate on the Node.js Foundation Board. The TSC Chair's role is helpful for keeping the Board up to date on what's going on in the technical community, keeping the Board honest on any expectations, bringing technical community concerns or questions to the Board and being the interface between both groups. I heard via email that Rod and Bert were potential candidates but haven't heard anything further. Would it be possible to decide soon? The Board Officer elections were schedule to kickoff tomorrow after the Gold and Silver Director elections end. If we can assist from the LF by setting up an anonymous email election or other process, we'd be happy to do so.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/nodejs/io.js/issues/2136.

[Fishrock123]

Is this for next week's meeting now?

[mikeal]

From what I recall in the TSC call: For the next board Meeting, which is Monday the 27th, both Bert and Rod will attend and we will finalize the election for the TSC seat after that meeting. This means they will not be eligible for Board officer seats (President, Vice-President and Treasurer) because those are being elected in the next meeting but it sounded like neither Rod or Bert is interested in that anyway.

[rvagg]

Really sorry for the long post, I've tried to shorten it! I've been sitting on this post for most of the last 2 weeks, but I'm now of the opinion we need to push this forward for resolution so we can get on with everything that we need to achieve.

Consider this both an explanation of where we're at right now and also a pitch from me for the TSC rep position.

Bert and I are in the unfortunate position of having neither of our respective companies present on the board as StrongLoop missed out on the Silver seat and NodeSource missed out on the Gold seat. This means neither of us are able to proxy our concerns to the board in a direct fashion.

As an aside it also means that the board currently contains no companies in the Node service space as nearForm is also not present, (Joyent and IBM come closest but their business models around Node are very different) this is very disappointing as each of these companies represent a large number of downstream medium to large enterprise Node users. But that's a topic for another discussion! The purpose of this seat is to represent the TSC's interests rather than our employers', we're just in a position of having fewer connections to the board than we'd both hoped.

Here's my main interest in being the TSC's representative on the board:

This initial period in the life of the Foundation is vital in ensuring that the processes, relationships and precedents are set up properly in order to have a Foundation that functions according to the interests of the existing Node community.

We've been through a lot of pain in the last couple of years to get to a position where the project wouldn't be beholden to a single corporate entity and that the community (as amorphous as it is) has the ability to drive Node and its ecosystem according to its interests rather than the narrow interests of a single company.

The risk that I see is that we are now rapidly professionalising the Foundation, with a corporate-heavy board. I know that most of the members of the board, and their respective companies, are very interested in making sure they are well connected to the community. I'm not suggesting at all that there's any ill-intent at the board level whatsoever, these companies are investing in Node's future because they believe in it. However, the risk is regarding the disparity between the ability of the board to act professionally and decisively compared to the relatively ad-hoc nature of the community we currently have and the way we are still trying to figure out how we operate without a strong BDFL telling us what to do (and how to resist the tendency to promote a BDFL because it's easy!). It's this disparity that causes me the most concern in this initial spin-up phase because there's a likelihood of setting precedents for how things get done that put most of the impetus of the project into the hands of the formal Foundation entity and risk marginalising the broader community and user-base. Not that the board or Foundation shouldn't have a role of course, but my experience with other community-focused groups tells me that the more you professionalise the center—particularly when you have the luxury of being able to employ people to take on some of the work—the more you risk crowding out a broader circle of participants.

Some examples of this kind of thing might be:

• The website working group needs to get a new website organised. There's pressure now to get a new site out before the converged release and also to better reflect the move to the Foundation. However, the website working group is in a sensitive position at the moment having just merged responsibilities of the two main web properties and properly taking ownership for nodejs.org which was once driven by a strong Joyent hand. It seems to me that we are currently waiting for the emergence of a strong sense of ownership, of authority and even leadership within that group. So we have a clash of urgency with a group that is not yet well suited to handle urgency. So, the expedient path here is to push forward with Foundation resources, pull in some paid designer time, perhaps even some paid time for technical work. Which might get us to the required end-point but in the process we set a precedent that reinforces the ownership of authority, action and resources in the corporate side of the Node project (the Foundation).
• The evangelism group is in a similar position with similar pressures, see this thread.
• The build working group needs a bit more ARM hardware. So far, the significant resources of the build working group exists through donations from the community. From IaaS providers like DigitalOcean and Rackspace, to providers of specific hardware like Joyent, IBM, ARM Holdings and Linaro all the way down to individual community members donating one or two Raspberry Pi (and other) boards each for the ARM cluster. We currently need 2 more Raspberry Pi boards. The expedient path here is to bill it to the Foundation because it has money for things like this. In fact, Pi's are cheap enough that I could probably get away with expensing them myself. However, the donations we've had of ARM hardware has been super-valuable for community building. We are labelling slaves in Jenkins and calling out the individuals that have stepped up all around the world to donate these boxes. This provides a direct avenue for outsiders to contribute and illustrates to everyone else that the project is even bigger than the list of names that hang around the core repositories.
• Marketing requires professional resources. This is where we get into a tricky space because there are certain activities that corporate entities are much better at doing than community groups. Marketing is one of these, as is dealing with other corporate and government entities (did everyone enjoy that Ecma International thread?) and even talking to journalists and analysts. It's hard to push responsibility for these things onto the community and it's reasonable that the Foundation would take a strong role here. However, there are ways that we can ensure the community has involvement. The expedient path would be to just tick a box and make it happen. The ideal path would be to seek input and involvement from the community, to engage an existing working group or to set a new one up so that there's a liaison point.

So this is my interest in representing the TSC in this precarious initial phase: we've worked really hard to put Node in the hands of the community, to have it directed by individuals that are deeply committed to the project and driven by a very broad and diverse group of collaborators and we've encouraged them to think of themselves as owners. We now have a Foundation that has significant resources to make stuff happen. However, when we start using those resources to replace community activity, either specific actions or even paying people-time to fill important roles, we'll be dealing with the risk of pushing the Foundation (or simply the Board) into the leadership position for the project and the having the community just tagging along for the ride. I think I can speak for those of us who have pushed hard to get us to this place and say that what we really want is for the Foundation & Board to exist as facilitators, to be the grease in our wheels, to make it easier to take action but not to heavy-handedly direct and orchestrate all of that action.

[mikeal]

@rvagg just wanted to add some updates and clarifications to your comments about the website and evangelism working groups.

So, the expedient path here is to push forward with Foundation resources, pull in some paid designer time, perhaps even some paid time for technical work.

While we've gotten certain design resources from the community in the past a full re-design hasn't emerged. We got close to one with io.js but it was never actually finished. This is why I suggested that we pull in a temporary design resource from the foundation to get us unblocked. My thinking was that this was similar to the problem we had when we first put up the website, a lot of people were talking about what to do but until I threw up something that was "good enough" but actually pretty bad people weren't engaged. Immediately after that people cleaned up that code, made incremental design improvements, and now none of my terrible initial code is left, SUCCESS!

The situation we have now is similar, but maybe worse, because we have a growing list of requirements and a lot of contributors simply waiting for a large design to land in their lap. My hope was that the design work from the foundation would be a kickoff point where, once implemented, the community would take up improving it and evolving it over time.

Also, in the current budget there isn't any money allocated to a technical resource to implement the design. That is left to the community. If nobody picks it up I might jump in and do it myself, so I guess you could technically say that the foundation is picking up the bill, but I don't think that's what you meant :)

The evangelism group is in a similar position with similar pressures, see this thread.

This is a little different than the previously noted website work. The website design is sort of a one time thing. Maintaining the social media accounts is a more long term thing. It's also something that everyone (community, foundation, companies) want to see happen and I wanted to make sure that the evangelism working group was interested in and can develop a good plan for sustaining that work. It looks like the answer is yes, there as some good ideas about how to get the work done and people are jumping in to help, so I'm confident that we'll have a good plan there and enough volunteers to make it happen.

[piscisaureus]

Rod, what about you do it for now and we'll do an election some time later this year, after at least a couple of months?

[rvagg]

@piscisaureus OK, fine by me of course. I believe this means the TSC should be able to put in a vote on the board positions; I'll follow that up via email.

[Fishrock123]

Tagging to officiate this wednesday.