Proposal: Contributor ladder - aka How can someone become a maintainer?

[msw]

(speaking only for myself)

@janhoy

Has anyone seen any sign of progress from AWS’s side on choosing a governance model?

This would be an anti-pattern, in my personal opinion. You’re suggesting that folks at AWS should choose a governance model. I think that governance is a living, evolving thing in cooperative efforts that last long periods of time. Governance should be tweaked by those who are governed (i.e., first the people doing the work, then all stakeholders of varying classes).

Governance should be discussed, debated, and then adopted and put into practice. I think that is happening here on the forum. It should not be discussed in private. Speaking for myself, I would rather it also not be debated on a video conference because it’s not very accessible to me due to other obligations. But, I am only one voice in this, and I’m not in a position of power where I am “deciding” anything. I wouldn’t want to assume any special privilege in being made any accommodation. I’m only here to ask questions and provide advice based on my experience with FOSS, and also my experience as a long-time Amazon employee (I know the culture and our practices quite well).

@janhoy

I think it would benefit both AWS and the whole community if there was some sort of roadmap laid ouf with the end goal of incubating with a foundation is stated, along with a deadline, even if that deadline is as far away as 6 months.

Using the services that a foundation can provide is mostly orthogonal to establishing governance, unless a foundation is strongly opinionated about how governance should be done (many are not). The decision about when (and if) incubating with a foundation is one that is made through the decision-making process that governance lays out. People sometimes go to the Apache Software Foundation incubator without knowing that graduation requires certain practiced elements of governance in accordance with ASF policy and philosophy. This doesn’t always work out for long term success.

@janhoy

I have to admit that all I have been able to read between the lines so far is that OpenSearch is going to be just another Vendor-owned open source project with good intentions but no real openness. I

I think that you’re reading things between the lines that are not actually there, and are based on words. What matters is actions. “Walking the walk” as we said at Red Hat.

@jkowall

I’ve mostly been watching the dialog and “liking” things that stand for a multi-company representation of contributors, maintainers, and community members. This has been really hard for Amazon and is counter to the culture at the organization.

I do not want to minimize your experiences collaborating with folks who work at Amazon so far. Your feedback is essential to our shared success. But I personally, think that you are generally mischaracterizing Amazon culture and how we operate, at least from my perspective. From the outside, there are glimpses of the foundations of Amazon culture visible, like our Leadership Principles and practices of using tenets for decision-making. An outsider might assume that the Amazon Leadership Principle of “Ownership” means tight control over a project like OpenSearch. That is not what a good owner does.

Ownership

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job."

To me, Ownership is about stewardship. It’s caring for the whole, and not focusing on only the part. It’s about instilling an “ownership culture” where you are a part of what’s built. When building FOSS together, we all are Owners, and we all have to act on behalf of all stakeholders, beyond the needs of a single organization. I would tweak the Leadership Principle like this:

Ownership

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire community, beyond just their own company. They never say “that’s not my job."

@jkowall

I have a lot of private meetings with Amazon folks and they want to do the right thing they are just unable to let go of control of the project to date.

This is something that sets off alarm bells for me. When it comes to OpenSearch governance discussions (in particular), I believe we should be making them in the open, transparently. When it comes to partnership activities around AWS managed services (like the Amazon Elasticsearch Service), they should be done privately. I think this separation can be confusing, especially given a pending rename of the service to Amazon OpenSearch Service. But it is important to have that separation, as far as I’m concerned. Others may disagree.

@jkowall

I really hope the behavior changes and things become open and multi-company.

In specific terms, what do you want to see changed regarding behavior?

@jkowall

I’m going to keep pushing, but this is moving very slowly and I’m not seeing the actions yet to back up the words I am hearing.

Again, what actions do you want to see?

To me, the most important decisions happen in the day-to-day activities of the people doing the work. Writing code, submitting pull requests, getting PR reviews, planning features, determining release schedules, declaring an Alpha release, Beta release, 1.0. Are you concerned with how any of that is going?

@jkowall

I know I am personally and my company is behind a community, and we have dedicated engineers (some posting on this thread) to work on OpenSearch.

I am not close to the day-to-day effort here, and anyone who is dedicating their time and attention has far more information than I do. What do dedicated developers have to say about how things are going with their collaborative work? Are they getting frustrated that PRs are going unanswered? That development related discussions are not happening via GitHub PRs, issues, and forum posts? I believe that direct, candid feedback provides the best information for addressing any immediate concerns.