[kata-dev] Elections | Q&A | What are the current pain points with the AC and how to solve them?

Fabiano Fidêncio fabiano at fidencio.org
Tue Nov 15 11:50:44 UTC 2022


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 Fidêncio



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