 Hello. Hello. Erin, you are signed into something that is not you. What can I say? We're karate? Oh, weird. Let me, well, it is our dojo, but let me, I don't know why it signed me in. Let me sign out of that one. I think you should be able to just rename yourself. It's very funny. Good morning. Good morning. Oh yeah, I'm Bozeman Karate. Okay, I'll come back. Everyone who is here, I guess we'll just give it a couple of minutes. Actually not seeing the participant number go up for a minute. So, apart from Erin coming back, maybe we've got everyone who we're going to have. Oh no, no, more people are joining. And Erin is now properly here. There we go. Sorry. Keeping everyone on their toes. Amy, do you see I have to drop at the half hour. You and a bunch of other people, but that's okay because we're not going to try to do a vote today because we don't have quorum. I think so. Sorry. I think we just have one main topic. Should we get started since we have a few people who have time pressure. Yeah, so normal rules apply and trust. You made it here. And Amy will take a register. Okay, so our main item on the agenda is we've been talking a little bit amongst the TSE about ways of streamlining the incubation process. So I think we're at a good point now where we could open up that discussion, get feedback from the broader community on on what we're proposing here. So I actually drew a few diagrams to try and explain kind of what we think some of the issues are with the existing process and how we think we can make it smoother and hopefully faster. So, currently the process looks like this that's the diagram that I pulled out of the, the process documentation on GitHub. And if you go to the next slide, our first issue is that we have these two phases where theoretically the TOC are spending time reviewing some information that's actually fairly similar. You know, if we if we look at a SIG recommendation, it's supposed to be much lighter weight than the due diligence document. But in practice, a lot of thought often seems to have gone into that document. It seems like having two phases where we're looking, you know, essentially trying to come up with some sort of judgment around a project, maybe two phases for that is unnecessary. Next slide. Highlighting the fact that we have an overlap between the material that gets presented in the project proposal. Some project proposals are, you know, pretty bare minimum and others are much, much, much more detailed. But essentially, they're starting to go down the road of why that project feels that they're ready for incubation. So quite often, it's got a lot of information about the project. A lot of information about why they, why and how they're meeting the criteria. Often that's duplicated in the SIG presentation, the SIG presentation and the due diligence. There's just a ton of overlap in all these things. So we have some ideas for trying to rationalize this. I guess another problem that we've seen before move on is that it's not always obvious who owns the process. A project that isn't necessarily seeing progress doesn't necessarily know who to talk to. So if we move to the next slide, I think the main thing that we want to change is getting an incubation sponsor from the TOC involved right from the get go. I think that's going to add a lot of advantages, which we'll talk about in a minute. If we go to the next slide. I think we've already gotten that incubation sponsor in the front of the process. We no longer need to sort of assign them in the middle of the process. Next slide. Then we have these two bits of documentation that seem very, very similar so we could combine those into one. Next slide. And just have one set of, you know, it's all the same content but you know we don't need to come up with it in two different phases, consider it all to be part of due diligence. And then next slide. We have the incubation sponsor stepping forward at the beginning of this process. They can coordinate with the SIG, they can work with the SIG and the projects to figure out who's doing what parts of the due diligence. They can be doing the user interviews in parallel at the same time as the SIG presentation is happening. Hopefully parallelizing this can speed things along a bit. Plus, having that TOC sponsor involved right from the beginning means there's a clear person who owns the process and who owns making sure it doesn't just get stuck dragging on forever. So yeah, next slide. I tried to sum up what I think we think are the kind of highlights and improvements for this. Essentially a single point of contact for the project who's driving the incubation process, who can do all the coordination with SIGs. The TOC sponsor is, they already are the person who is supposed to decide when the due diligence is ready for the TOC and the broader community to look at. They're already the person who basically assesses whether the discussion is over and whether it's ready to call for a vote. So I think by making this change we just make it simpler terms of the TOC sponsor driving that whole process. I think we can also make it clearer to projects who apply but then. I mean, we already have the situation that if a TOC sponsor doesn't step forward, they, they're not going to get to a vote. I mean, by having that sponsor right at the beginning of the process, we don't have this situation where the projects done a lot of work, they've worked with the SIG, they think they're really on route and then it bogs down because there isn't a TOC member who's got the enthusiasm to to push it through. I think that that should help projects get a clearer answer on whether they're likely to get through this process and hopefully with one person kind of owning it, they'll get a clearer answer on how long that process might take. Kind of describes what it is that that we're proposing here and I would love feedback, questions, concerns, what have we missed in coming up with this streamline process, you know, are we, are we going to lose any benefits from the current process. Open to you. Like the idea of having a sponsor engaged from the get go. I know there are several projects that went through due diligence or just, you know, extensive SIG review that there could never find a sponsor and I think that was very frustrating to many projects so having that interest and support at the beginning at least gives them an idea of what they need to be able to provide as part of the due diligence so I'm in full support of it. Great. The only caveat I guess I would say is, there are occasions where on the TOC we don't have the expertise subject matter expertise to be able to understand it it would just require maybe more heavy lifting on the TOC. It's an area that isn't well represented today, but I think today we don't have that problem but I know in the past that has been a concern where the SIG was able to provide more insight than maybe the TOC members had. Yeah, I think that might have improved through having like we now 11 rather than nine so slightly more breadth hopefully. And yeah I think that there is still the possibility that a project comes along and and none of us knows enough about it to feel confident to to sponsor it. I did put something in the wording of the PR to suggest that if it kind of sits there in a state for, I can't remember a certain amount of time. The project could request to come to the TOC meeting and talk about themselves because perhaps they could clarify like, you know, maybe even draw up some enthusiasm amongst us. A couple of comments coming in. Katie saying positive things. Josh also saying positive things. We were recruiting sponsors at the beginning anyway so it's great to make that official I think that's also true a lot of projects have been reaching out to try and find sponsors early in the process because it's helpful so. Katie asking are there any differences for a project that would like to go straight to incubation not a sandbox project at the moment. If so, I don't think this needs to change anything because the project proposal can come either from a sandbox project or from a new new project. Just, just a quick question. I actually think this is really positive to one of the reasons why we put the sick presentation in there was because I think the projects were having a challenge trying to make their case of the project presented without doing a presentation to anybody and kind of just hoping for a to see members who kind of pick up the button. And I'm kind of wondering if maybe the to see sponsor. Maybe, maybe there might be a sort of simple process where the to see liaison for the sake with the 10s, all of the project presentations and then that way they could automatically become sponsors once they've seen the presentation perhaps. And I'm just kind of wondering, otherwise, are we kind of creating a process where the project have to make their case to find a sponsor and then have to make their case again to the sake, which seems like another duplication. I guess, a couple of thoughts. One is that we see, you know, some projects presented the sake completely out of band of any proposal process which is absolutely great you know we want that kind of discussion and seeks looking at projects just out of interest without necessarily being an associated like proposal behind it. I think. So in this proposal we're not saying that the sick presentation goes away but we're saying that can happen in parallel. And I suppose your concern is that without the sick presentation happening first, there might not be enough information for the to know whether it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, the TOC asked the sake to do this, the project presentation and recommendation first because often the to see them have enough information to go on at the proposal stage. So, I was just wondering, you know how do we avoid getting back into that scenario. I think kind of related to this Josh is suggesting what about having a sick lead co sponsor when there isn't enough to see expertise. Which I think is totally totally doable because the to see sponsor already kind of has the ability to delegate whatever parts of the due diligence they want to delegate. So actually recruiting some support from a sick and maybe if a sick lead is super enthusiastic about a project they can come to the TOC and say I really think you should be looking at this project seriously because it's awesome. I think that that should be. I don't see anything wrong with that. I think that's a good thing. Yeah. I think Alex's concern is. So, for those of us who work for large vendors who've been involved in the CNCF for a long time it's relatively easy for us to figure out to see sponsors. But if somebody who's a brand new organization is bringing a new project to the CNCF that's that's been in sandbox. So having the sick presentation first, how do they find the TOC sponsor. Okay, so I guess something that isn't necessarily spelled out here is that when we get a new incubation proposal that typically Chris or Amy kind of flags up to us hey such and such a product as applied for incubation. Sometimes it's even ahead of that they'll be a like such and such a project, you know, called up got in touch because they're interested, and that that can kind of trigger a bit of like, oh that's amazing I'm really excited about that project or we have no idea who that project is, you know, somewhere on that spectrum. So I guess maybe what we need is we need to make sure that between that project proposal coming in. If, if a sponsor steps forward that's great we're sorted if a sponsor doesn't step forward. We probably collectively as a TOC need to decide whether that's because of a lack of knowledge or because we're just not particularly keen on that project. We still keep the TOC liaison for each sake, yes, yes, this doesn't affect the TOC liaisons at all. And actually this is a great point the TOC liaisons can have conversations about these proposals. For sure. Maybe that's actually worth adding into the process to say you know if a to see incubation sponsor doesn't immediately step forward. In that liaison discussion with the relevant SIG they can, you know, ask for an opinion. Brendan's asking what the specificity of the ask or scope of the SIG recommendations. Is this our scope towards a case by case basis determined by the sponsor? I think it really is case by case basis determined so in reality sometimes we get projects that come in that are so obviously great and you know maybe we need to check some things about the really the kind of canonical example of this was this was SCD right when SCD like joined the CNCF it was already amused by like I don't know what percentage huge percentage of Kubernetes deployments so it was a very known project to everybody on the TOC. And at the other end of the scale there can be projects that come along that are completely unknown to us. And so if we have prior knowledge because you know we're out there in the world maybe we're in a better position to sort of make decisions maybe there are other projects where we really need to lean more heavily on the SIG I don't think there's a sort of one size fits all answer to that. I think actually maybe this will make it clearer to the SIGs, if the if the TOC sponsor can be more clear with the SIG about what help they need and what information they're looking for that might help avoid some of the scenarios we've seen where I think we've had a couple of cases where SIGs haven't been quite sure I think you know whether maybe they're leaning towards saying no or maybe as a SIG they're a bit split and they don't quite know how to communicate that but having a sponsor who can kind of work through that with them maybe makes that more productive. Yeah what if we had a case where the sponsor was enthusiastic about sponsoring it but the SIG was very much against it. What would we do in that case? So I guess I guess the SIG can bring their concerns, well yeah maybe the SIG can bring their concerns to bear through the TOC liaisons or directly into the TOC. It's actually just cross my mind as you're saying that perhaps we should make it explicit that the sponsor can't be somebody who's, I think we would avoid this anyway but perhaps we should explicitly say the sponsor can't be somebody who's got an interest in that project, you know, can't be from the same organization. Because that would be the obvious kind of reason why someone might disagree with me. Yeah I think we should, I feel like that's common sense but I think it's better to be explicit than that because that I agree I think that was, is one of the scenarios where that could come up. Yeah. So from SIG security perspective at least what we're trying to do is we're trying to say that, you know, there is kind of like if you're going through incubation this is what the SIG is going to do in terms of evaluating and providing recommendations so that we, you know, try and keep it as consistent as possible across recommendations but I think with the recommendations varying it's a bit difficult to kind of say that every single project that goes through incubation needs to have this level of documentation of security for example. SIG security is a special case here because you do the recommendations for kind of how can, how should this project address security concerns or what security concerns might have which is a slightly special role for SIG security. And I think we should have that regardless because, you know, whenever we bring in a project into, well particularly into incubation stage I think it's important to try and get that input on whether there are any security concerns that need to be addressed. But I also think that doesn't have to be a block or on incubation it's more okay so that's that's one of the things that we can do to help improve projects to get that input on and recommendations for security improvements. Other recommendations were made from SIG security have never been gaining criteria. Yeah, always been fairly objective and products have been really good about it. It's never been like this project poses a threat ecosystem. It's never been like that. I'm curious though, what if a prospective project approaches the SIG first? Should we broker an intro with the talk liaison? Should we bring it to the talk? Should we just redirect them to you all? I think it is totally fine for projects to come and talk to the SIG and say, you know, we'd like to just share our project with you, we'd like your opinions. That's all fine. At the point where they kind of start saying we want to join the CNCF, they need to go through the proposal process. So, you know, I hope everyone would point them at kind of here's the process documentation here are, you know, people to talk to like Amy and Chris if there are kind of concerns about how to go through that process. Yeah, I don't think we need anything super formal there. People behave in a good way, point people in the right direction. And absolutely, I don't think there's any reason to prevent conversations of SIGs and projects are talking to each other. That's a fabulous thing. There. Keep it social. Open door pop. Yeah, I mean, I guess that if a project is having a positive interaction with the SIG, you know, they're getting a good experience with the SIG, maybe that makes them think, you know, warmly towards the CNCF and they want to apply and they want to become part of the foundation. That's all a good thing. They obviously have to go through the process to become part of the CNCF. The other thing is they might want to get ahead and save time, typically while having been on pushing a project through sandbox to incubation. I wanted to take care of as much of the due diligence that I could. So I could give it to the sponsor to just checks and balances, rather than put the onus and then so. Well, we'll open it up as a props up and products come to us, but some products may have to self initiate ahead of time. I think that continues to be to be true and continues to be possible. It just means that because we definitely see this with a lot of projects that are, you know, come very well prepared and they've looked at all the requirements and they've tried to document that upfront and the TSC sponsor still needs to kind of go through that information and verify for themselves that they believe it. And, you know, this, the TSC sponsor absolutely needs to be doing end user interviews to make sure that it's, you know, what the project is saying is grounded in the reality of end users experience with the project. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the project. Helping, you know, get information in place. Liz, one quick clarifying thing. I'm just going to mention this because I don't think we answered it. The whole point of saying up the six, the way we did initially was because the TSC couldn't see all the project presentations it wanted to see. And on the other hand, it couldn't make decisions as to whether to sponsor a project or not without seeing the presentation. So the whole idea was presented the six that there was there was like a three R step. And I'm, you know, I do agree it was having a clear point of contact with the TSC sponsor at the beginning is obviously great. But I'm sort of wary of the fact that we're just going to go back to the same problem we had before where, you know, until the project makes a presentation there isn't enough information for a sponsor to step up potentially and without a sponsor they don't get to do the rest of the process. So we may need to have to have a sort of a step where if a sponsor isn't available within a period of time that they make a presentation or supply additional information or something to help a sponsor get to that point. Yeah, I mean, I suppose, I'm just wondering about the the formality of this, I think in practice we're seeing six, it was seeing projects presented six, you know, irrespective of the process. And that could mean that they've just done a presentation, you know, and the presentation is what led them to think oh you know I want to do incubation now because I got such good feedback, you know, positive feedback. I don't think we need to go through the process of doing another presentation just for the sake of it. I think some of the problems that we had with presentations. One of the old days was that we'd spend a lot of time collectively looking at presentations, you know, attending presentations about projects where the presentation was mostly telling us things that we could read from the read me. That didn't feel like a hugely productive use of time and I think maybe having a smaller audience that was more expert and that could kind of start asking more interesting questions improves the quality of the presentations and make those makes us better use of the time. I guess, I guess one thing we could, could say that wouldn't change this much but would be possible is we could say that if a TSC sponsor steps forward great they're going to drive the whole thing they're going to make sure a presentation happens. If a TSC sponsor doesn't step forward there's no reason why the SIG and the and the project can't agree to do a presentation regardless. And if that turns out to be inspiring enough and useful enough to use, you know, we don't want to be just scheduling presentations for the, for the sake of process we should be doing them because they're useful. Alain is saying yes sometimes presentations made before the incubation proposal. So maybe we just need to kind of document that that could happen. Yeah. Makes sense. Great. The only other thing that I can say is, if there hasn't been a presentation then the TSC sponsor as the first order of business would say, go make a presentation to the SIGs. So at least it will be useful as a like a social gathering where people get to know each other. So, you know, it'll help smoothen things over the longer time right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's absolutely the intention. Yeah. Sorry to be pedantic, but if the TSC without presentation is going to ask the project to do a presentation first and why don't the projects always do a presentation first and then apply to have a TSC sponsor. So partly to figure out which SIG partly because what actually the biggest thing is this this issue of projects getting stuck in SIGs where, you know, there is enthusiasm. I think we need to optimize for the case where we've got an amazing project where the TSC already is pretty enthusiastic, you know, we, it's not a done deal but there's there's a lot of, there's a lot of sentiment that that's a good project. And the cases, I don't want to let down the other cases but I feel like that, because we can always, we can always adapt like we, you know, we can, there are never any rules that say you can't do something. But I think we need to just try and streamline for the for the good case where we do have a pretty clear, or you know a case where I mean I think a sponsor probably goes into sponsoring thinking that they're going to vote. You know, they probably don't go into it thinking, you know, bad things about that project but maybe occasionally they will honor something in DD that makes them change their mind. Makes sense. We don't have an appropriate SIG. That shouldn't be the case. I mean maybe maybe it's, maybe it's true. I think at the moment we think that every project does fit into a SIG somehow. Every project that we currently have. But like I'm looking at a couple of management projects and we don't have a SIG for cluster management. So, I think, depending on exactly what it would be I would imagine that would either fall under runtime or delivery at the moment. There's another topic I don't want to get off on it. But it's just the example is, we can always, there are always potential projects who's fit within a particular SIG is not clear. And just suggesting that instead of a technical presentation the projects could make a pitch telling the story why the project belongs in the CNCF and benefit the ecosystem of the community. I think that could be part of a, you know, I'd hope that in a presentation there would be kind of talking about that somewhat. But ultimately it's part of the information that we require projects to suggest. Lee's saying we want to exercise caution in creating the fastest way the projects. I actually disagree with that. I think that there are projects that are so good, and that we want to get into the CNCF that are kind of no brainers. And projects unfortunately aren't all created equal and, you know, sometimes there are projects that folks in the TSE are really excited about and other times there are projects that we're kind of like. And I think we should be able to speed things along if they're, if everybody is, you know, big fans of those projects. It's still a vote right it's not like. Yeah, yeah, I did that there's logic in that I'm the to reflect on the ramifications of that though, for how that feels for others or just the, the gosh what's the word the, how that looks to other people. Oh, like optics. Yeah. I think what we don't want is some kind of queuing system where, like, it's not necessarily first in first out. And we might have concerns about some projects that we want to get fleshed out and we don't want to make everybody else's project delayed behind that. Yeah, totally, totally. That makes a lot of sense like, especially if you like, actually couching part of that. Well, no one said fast track other than me but I don't want to use it too much but like, couching part of that consideration in context of. And there's no that that each of the projects are can be processed, parallely through the yeah, like it was that they weren't being held to the same standard but, but in fact, if they're held to the same process, but, but, but yeah it's not a fight for so. Yeah, yeah. Ken saying recommend TSE provides sick guidance and need end user adoption to move is that out of sandbox. Yep. And the recommend that the guidance is more for the addressing the issue of six not having the TLC being like a bottleneck so if the six has some of the guidance for how not to you know, how to kind of address some of the questions that TLC has I think it won't be as much of a bottleneck. I think part of the, what I'm really hoping that the sponsor by having a sponsor who's kind of keen on making this happen we can, you know, that's a person who will talk to the sick to make sure that they're getting the information they need and that the sick and know who to talk to about that project and and. Yeah, because I think sometimes projects have just sort of been left a bit in limbo where nobody quite knows who to talk to or who's responsible. One thing that I worry about is this with this change projects will have a tendency to go shopping for sponsors and so at that point, each of us will be acting as individuals not as a group. Right, so if. So you know, that that's a concern. And I think we should still do the thing that when we're approached by a project. I don't even know if we've got this written down anywhere we should do, but generally speaking when a TLC member gets approached by a project. You know that's fine, you know, project should be allowed to come and talk and ask for advice. Yeah, but we should share that like so. We need to talk to each other yeah. Yeah. We did used to have that problem where a project would come along and they talk to somebody and that that person would say well you know what, don't think you're quite ready and these are my concerns and they just go on to the next person they wouldn't mention the concerns and Yeah. Yeah, something that's just just just just a thought is it, is it worth having like a similar clearing process of the TSE can to the, to the process use for sandbox so the TSE can meet as a group every few weeks and kind of just figure out what the sponsor should be for any incubation projects that are in the pipeline or that have applied, and then that way you can make the determination then whether you need more info or needs a project presentation or whether you know it's it's a clearly great project that has an obvious sponsor. I guess, Amy, what, maybe we could add sort of outstanding incubation proposals to the, the monthly meeting where we do the sig update maybe we could also have a list of the. Yeah, in the past I've put like the votes that are currently out because frankly if I put all things are out there for like everything coming in for incubation it would be a very long slide but I think that might actually be compelling at some points to be able to say, look, look how all of these things are out there. Yeah, like, who's the sponsor and then we'd be able to everybody would be able to easily see an update of like which ones are outstanding which ones have a sponsor. I'm almost inclined to be able to make that part of like the public meeting document. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what I'm thinking about is like I want to wait for people to be able to come and see this and like put comments in there and if I leave it like a slide deck that kind of like you know only rises once a month. That's not as meaningful. So I think about like how, how to be able to make this both transparent and available for people to be able to come in and say hey, I'm willing to sponsor this project. Here's how this moves forward. Yeah, and I think reviewing that at that public meeting would be useful, give everybody a checkpoint. Yeah, that's fine. That helps with the workload problem we were talking about tool is where we don't know how many to see members are like, yeah, and who haven't. Who aren't. Great point. Yeah. I guess it also means that if somebody has a concern. You know, there might be a project that for whatever reason someone has a concern, it's public who's the sponsor is they know who to talk to. Yeah. I think that's great idea. Yeah. All right. Any other thoughts additions. One question. Do we have a timeline for when we want to try to be able to adopt this. Good question. I was just going to say how quickly we type it in and then Cornelia said the diagrams are really helpful and the PR. Yeah, I should have them in. Yeah. Is this something we have to vote on. I think we should. Yes. Yes, that's what I'm thinking as well. Don't think we're quora are we. Okay, so we'll need to do a lot easier to track an email anyway so how about this Liz if you update the PR and then let me know when it's updated I can put this out for a vote. Sounds good to me. Cool. Awesome. Perfect. I think that was pretty, pretty productive and we've come up with some useful additions and clarifications so fabulous. Has anyone got any other business they would like to raise today. Going, going. Go on. Okay, we're done. That was very productive. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you. Wonderful. Take care everyone have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Bye.