Announcing the Moby Technical Steering Committee
While it has been nearly a month since the vote was finalized, this is the Moby project’s first official opportunity to announce the formation of the technical steering committee that replaces the previous BDFL governance model.
History
As the Moby Project umbrella was announced earlier this year at DockerCon Austin, preceded by the containerd spin-out announcement in late 2016, there was a resurgence of discussion regarding the BDFL governance model across the community. In mid-2017 Solomon Hykes reached out to a small group of community leaders across the cloud native spectrum and asked for help to form a transition plan from BDFL to a new committee-centric governance. With the input of Kubernetes, CNCF, and other community leaders — many who use various oversight/steering committee models themselves — and the drafting of a TSC charter by Michael Crosby, by mid-September we had agreement on a charter and plan to move forward with a governance model transition. At Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles, during the Moby Summit, Patrick Chanezon publicly announced the new governance model and the intent to finalize the charter and have a vote within the next month or two.
Fast forward to October and the maintainers representing the Moby umbrella projects had generated a candidate list and had begun the voting process. Per the charter, each project voted on the candidate list and the output of each project’s election was delivered in the final vote via a project representative. On November 13th those formal steps were finalized and the result of the vote was announced publicly and committed to the moby/tsc repository.
Membership
The initial seven members of the TSC represent six different companies. This is great initial diversity, not to mention the charter will never allow a single company more than one-third representation. At the current TSC size that means no more than two members can be from the same vendor company. To give you a brief overview of the initial members, each one has provided a short reference regarding their current work and involvement with the Moby projects.
Laura Frank: Director of Engineering at Codeship, Docker Captain, and co-maintainer of many early Docker developer tools like Panamax and ImageLayers.
Arnaud Porterie: VP Engineering at Vente Privée, former Engineering Manager of the Engine team at Docker, and maintainer of several Moby projects.
Tianon Gravi: SVP of Operations at InfoSiftr, Moby (formerly Docker) Core Maintainer since 2013, OCI runtime-spec TDC member/maintainer, and maintainer/curator of the Official Images program.
Justin Cormack: Engineer at Docker, maintainer of Moby and LinuxKit and contributor to many of the Moby projects.
Phil Estes: Senior Technical Staff Member, Office of the CTO, IBM Watson & Cloud Platform. Docker Captain, maintainer for Moby (formerly Docker) Core, founding maintainer of the CNCF containerd project, and contributor to the OCI runtime implementation, runc.
Stefan Scherer: Engineer at SEAL Systems, Docker Captain, co-maintainer of several Hypriot projects for Docker on ARM, contributor to Docker and Moby projects.
Sebastiaan van Stijn: Open source contributions manager at Docker, curator and contributor to several Moby projects.
Responsibilities
As quoted directly from the charter, the responsibilities provided to the Moby TSC are to:
1. Serve as an escalation point for members of the community to file a dispute or report concerns on technical issues.
2. Ensure that appropriate communication exists between projects.
3. Keep a public record of escalations, actions, and decisions.
We believe these responsibilities are fairly lightweight. Our goal is not to technically direct or provide oversight to the day to day responsibilities of each Moby project. That role is already provided for — and will continue to be — by the maintainers for each member project. We will, however, be available for dealing with escalations of a technical nature for any of the Moby projects. Non-technical issues are already directed in the charter to the appropriate CoC committee or process, whether that be Docker or the CNCF, depending on project governance.
In summary, we hope the TSC will be a valuable incremental improvement to the governance of the Moby open source projects. The TSC members are each personally interested in advancing the openness and inclusion of the Moby project umbrella, and look forward to enabling that as much as we can in our roles. If you have questions about the charter, the expected work of the TSC or any of the related processes, please feel free to reach out to any TSC member. We look forward to working for you and with you across the Moby projects!
