Let me reply to my own question, and add some of the interesting points raised. Eric mentioned:
I don't feel there are that many challenges with respect to the architecture committee *itself* to day, as we haven't had a ton of need to specifically exercise it.
And I partially disagree with that. While we didn't have conflits to solve as part of the Architecture Committee, I think we're lacking the "leading by example" attitude. I see the Architecture Committee, or a Technical Steering Committee, of any project as not only the place where conflicts will be solved, or ideas will come from, but I do also expect the participants to be "down in the trenches" to understand the possible issues of the project, and also to be responsive when tagged by other community members (and here we also touch the part related to offline discussions). I currently feel we don't do enough of that. Archana mentioned:
(...) it also makes it highly difficult to track high-priority issues and features that need attention in terms of agreed direction.
And I agree with that. However, IMHO, we go back to the "leading by example" topic. Every now and then we get explicitly tagged to issues, and there's absolutely zero reply for weeks, if not for months. If I were to be a newcomer, I'd be quite frustrated by that, sincerely.
I feel dedicating 10-15 min every AC meeting to triage over high priority issues opened over the last week could be a useful step.
And we had that, a dedicated session to triage issues, which was not very popular and not a bunch of people joined. IMHO, this goes back to the same point raised above, as even when we did the triage, every now and then we'd tag reviewers and no replies would be provided. ... At the moment I'm writing this down I've read Fupan's and Feng's answers as well, and to everything I didn't reply to, I must say that I agree. In general, from my experience in the past 2 years serving the community as part of the Architecture Committee, I've felt the following pain points: * Lack of "hands on" help with the issues raised by the community, be those related to coding, reviewing, triaging, or spreading the word about the project. * Lack of planning, as mentioned by Fupan, but I also understand that having several companies behind the project, each company with its own interests, makes this a little bit tricky to organise. * Lack of investment on user-experience to help grow the project. * This is not totally the Architecture Committee's fault, but I think the Architecture Committee should be paying a reasonable amount of attention to the entry points of the project, including technical documentation on best practices for deploying / upgrading / managing Kata Containers. * Lack of recognition of key members of the community * We've added more and more people to the maintainers group, and I'm happy about that, but it's hard to even find any documentation on how to add a new member to project, what's expected, and if a member doesn't fit what would be a reasonable feedback for the member to improve and try again. All in all, let me repeat myself here, I agree with the majority of the pain points raised, and I appreciate those who took time to bring those up. Please, do *not* take any of the points I brought up as a critique to one or another specific person, those are all points that I consider myself having to improve as well. Best Regards, -- Fabiano FidĂȘncio