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Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Middleton, Dan <dan.middleton@...>
Architecture working group?
From: <tsc@...> on behalf of "hmontgomery@..." <hmontgomery@...>
Hi Arnaud,
Thanks for the response. You are correct: I had, in fact, envisioned this as a bridge between maintainers/developers and researchers: researchers could contribute relevant research (and code) to maintainers for implementation in the project. Maintainers and developers, in turn, could contribute back interesting research problems to the researchers. This could serve as a mutually beneficial relationship where researchers get new ideas (and papers, of course) and maintainers get new improvements (and code). In addition, it would potentially get more academically inclined folks interested in contributing—lots of people like putting their ideas into practice. Currently we don’t have a lot of academic contributors. Lots of academics contribute directly to public blockchain stuff, and I don’t see why Hyperledger should be different.
However, I’m still not sure of what form this should take. It could be a working group—outputs could include code for projects, or at least RFCs/change suggestions (that the projects could implement or not)—or a SIG or something else entirely. What do people think?
Thanks, Hart
From: Arnaud Le Hors [mailto:lehors@...]
My first reaction was similar to Chris's and Dan's - we don't need yet another group - but having thought about this a bit I'm actually in favor of creating a group dedicated
to academic people.
Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all of the responses to my initial email. Rather than respond to all of them individually, I’ll try to address some points below. Hopefully this will be easier to follow than many different follow-ups.
From Virgil’s email:
When Ethereum had this same problem, we started the https://ethresear.chmessageboard to discuss problems and papers. Something similar might be useful to Hyperledger.” I agree!
From Brian’s email:
“We have long believed we need to engage academia, and have a formal process for doing so…” I spoke to people who tried to start this formal process and ended up somehow getting black holed (they filled out the paperwork/forms, but didn’t get back responses). This was a point of frustration and a reason why at least one person didn’t get involved further. That particular case should be rectified, though—thanks Marta!
“And true to form, we even have a mailing list.” Does anyone use this? I guess I should probably sign up….
“One challenge I've seen is that many academics aren't that familiar with open source in general - and aren't motivated to do more than public their papers and proof of concept code, since they are rewards for publishing, not for solving problems (at the risk of gross over-generalization).” This is certainly true for people that sit at their desk and do math all day. However, it’s far from the truth for good systems researchers. This point from Brian actually got brought up at the Dagstuhl seminar, but people didn’t agree. Mike Franklin (chair of the CS department at the U of Chicago) pointed out that he always liked to have his group contribute things back because it allowed them to find future research problems in a way that just writing the paper and going away did not. However, I will agree that most academics aren’t familiar with open source—other than Shahan Khatchadourian (of PegaSys), I think I was the only other person at this seminar with open-source experience, and most people were totally clueless. I think this means that we have an education issue with the blockchain research community.
From Chris’s email:
“What I would recommend is that we, as the TSC, take a hard look at contributor on-boarding of the various projects, suggest improvements to, or alignment of, the various projects processes and documentation and take a look at the various ways that a new user engages in Hyperledger generally to make sure that we are being as effective as possible in capturing new contributors.” I agree 100%. Even just posting the text from this email on the university page would be a good start!
From Vipin’s email:
“Please start a rocketchat channel called #research and publicise.” I’d support this as well.
From Dan’s email:
“Most if not all projects have contributors meetings listed on the HL calendar and CONTRIBUTING.md in the repos. Sawtooth’s for example points to: https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/community.html.” When people asked about contacting the maintainers or contributing, I mentioned this. No one was aware that these kind of files existed. There was also confusion related to the calendar—people weren’t sure which meetings they needed to attend. There are tons of meetings on the calendar these days! Some clarity on these would be great.
“Totally agree with Chris that another meeting group isn’t the best way to bridge the initial gap. In fact, I think siphoning that new-contributor interest into a meeting group is likely to be counterproductive.” I don’t agree with this. I think creating a group for researchers is likely to spur more researchers to attend and get involved rather than siphon away people. Ideally such a group would lower the activation energy for researchers to get involved and contribute and, in the long run, funnel them into the projects. I wouldn’t want to suggest a frequent or work-heavy meeting group—just discussions either biweekly or monthly. Can you explain your thought process more on this (i.e. tell me why I’m wrong ;))?
From Vipin’s next email:
“We have had several suggestions.” These are good ideas.
From Mark’s email:
“FWIW, the PSWG has three members* who were in academia and contributed to our first Metrics document. One of these folks also is a Caliper maintainer now.” There were several people at the seminar interested in Caliper. I suspect that it would be a big beneficiary of more academic involvement.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I didn’t expect this to spur so much discussion, but I think it is something that, if we address properly, could really benefit Hyperledger. Thanks again for reading, and have a great day.
Thanks, Hart
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Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
hmontgomery@us.fujitsu.com <hmontgomery@...>
Hi Arnaud,
Thanks for the response. You are correct: I had, in fact, envisioned this as a bridge between maintainers/developers and researchers: researchers could contribute relevant research (and code) to maintainers for implementation in the project. Maintainers and developers, in turn, could contribute back interesting research problems to the researchers. This could serve as a mutually beneficial relationship where researchers get new ideas (and papers, of course) and maintainers get new improvements (and code). In addition, it would potentially get more academically inclined folks interested in contributing—lots of people like putting their ideas into practice. Currently we don’t have a lot of academic contributors. Lots of academics contribute directly to public blockchain stuff, and I don’t see why Hyperledger should be different.
However, I’m still not sure of what form this should take. It could be a working group—outputs could include code for projects, or at least RFCs/change suggestions (that the projects could implement or not)—or a SIG or something else entirely. What do people think?
Thanks, Hart
From: Arnaud Le Hors [mailto:lehors@...]
My first reaction was similar to Chris's and Dan's - we don't need yet another group - but having thought about this a bit I'm actually in favor of creating a group dedicated
to academic people.
Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all of the responses to my initial email. Rather than respond to all of them individually, I’ll try to address some points below. Hopefully this will be easier to follow than many different follow-ups.
From Virgil’s email:
When Ethereum had this same problem, we started the https://ethresear.chmessageboard to discuss problems and papers. Something similar might be useful to Hyperledger.” I agree!
From Brian’s email:
“We have long believed we need to engage academia, and have a formal process for doing so…” I spoke to people who tried to start this formal process and ended up somehow getting black holed (they filled out the paperwork/forms, but didn’t get back responses). This was a point of frustration and a reason why at least one person didn’t get involved further. That particular case should be rectified, though—thanks Marta!
“And true to form, we even have a mailing list.” Does anyone use this? I guess I should probably sign up….
“One challenge I've seen is that many academics aren't that familiar with open source in general - and aren't motivated to do more than public their papers and proof of concept code, since they are rewards for publishing, not for solving problems (at the risk of gross over-generalization).” This is certainly true for people that sit at their desk and do math all day. However, it’s far from the truth for good systems researchers. This point from Brian actually got brought up at the Dagstuhl seminar, but people didn’t agree. Mike Franklin (chair of the CS department at the U of Chicago) pointed out that he always liked to have his group contribute things back because it allowed them to find future research problems in a way that just writing the paper and going away did not. However, I will agree that most academics aren’t familiar with open source—other than Shahan Khatchadourian (of PegaSys), I think I was the only other person at this seminar with open-source experience, and most people were totally clueless. I think this means that we have an education issue with the blockchain research community.
From Chris’s email:
“What I would recommend is that we, as the TSC, take a hard look at contributor on-boarding of the various projects, suggest improvements to, or alignment of, the various projects processes and documentation and take a look at the various ways that a new user engages in Hyperledger generally to make sure that we are being as effective as possible in capturing new contributors.” I agree 100%. Even just posting the text from this email on the university page would be a good start!
From Vipin’s email:
“Please start a rocketchat channel called #research and publicise.” I’d support this as well.
From Dan’s email:
“Most if not all projects have contributors meetings listed on the HL calendar and CONTRIBUTING.md in the repos. Sawtooth’s for example points to: https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/community.html.” When people asked about contacting the maintainers or contributing, I mentioned this. No one was aware that these kind of files existed. There was also confusion related to the calendar—people weren’t sure which meetings they needed to attend. There are tons of meetings on the calendar these days! Some clarity on these would be great.
“Totally agree with Chris that another meeting group isn’t the best way to bridge the initial gap. In fact, I think siphoning that new-contributor interest into a meeting group is likely to be counterproductive.” I don’t agree with this. I think creating a group for researchers is likely to spur more researchers to attend and get involved rather than siphon away people. Ideally such a group would lower the activation energy for researchers to get involved and contribute and, in the long run, funnel them into the projects. I wouldn’t want to suggest a frequent or work-heavy meeting group—just discussions either biweekly or monthly. Can you explain your thought process more on this (i.e. tell me why I’m wrong ;))?
From Vipin’s next email:
“We have had several suggestions.” These are good ideas.
From Mark’s email:
“FWIW, the PSWG has three members* who were in academia and contributed to our first Metrics document. One of these folks also is a Caliper maintainer now.” There were several people at the seminar interested in Caliper. I suspect that it would be a big beneficiary of more academic involvement.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I didn’t expect this to spur so much discussion, but I think it is something that, if we address properly, could really benefit Hyperledger. Thanks again for reading, and have a great day.
Thanks, Hart
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Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Kelly Cooper <kellycooper.2ds@...>
I think academics can help to clarify too. Questions discussed in working groups can go out to academics for a global research perspective. For example, last year I didn't quite understand a DAO. I ended up reading research from governance to collective and swarm intelligence. They weren't directly related; however, they helped me to see things differently. Academics can contribute as other email noted; they can also clarify ideas from many global and open journals that are not immediately obvious. Kelly
On Tue, Jul 9, 2019 at 2:42 AM Arnaud Le Hors <lehors@...> wrote: My first reaction was similar to Chris's and Dan's - we don't need yet another group - but having thought about this a bit I'm actually in favor of creating a group dedicated to academic people.
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Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Arnaud Le Hors
My first reaction
was similar to Chris's and Dan's - we don't need yet another group - but
having thought about this a bit I'm actually in favor of creating a group
dedicated to academic people.
I think it will be important to have that group well connected with the different projects by having people from the projects participate but I can see how having such a group would make it easier for academics to find their way into our community and get better connected. This can serve as a bridge, similar to what Hart actually did in engaging with attendees of the seminar in Germany, but within Hyperledger and on an on-going basis rather than a one-off. Cheers. -- Arnaud Le Hors - Senior Technical Staff Member, Blockchain & Web Open Technologies - IBM From: "hmontgomery@..." <hmontgomery@...> To: "tsc@..." <tsc@...> Date: 07/02/2019 09:16 PM Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Hyperledger TSC] Academic Involvement in Hyperledger Sent by: tsc@... Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all of the responses to my initial email. Rather than respond to all of them individually, I’ll try to address some points below. Hopefully this will be easier to follow than many different follow-ups.
From Virgil’s email:
When Ethereum had this same problem, we started the https://ethresear.chmessageboard to discuss problems and papers. Something similar might be useful to Hyperledger.” I agree!
From Brian’s email:
“We have long believed we need to engage academia, and have a formal process for doing so…” I spoke to people who tried to start this formal process and ended up somehow getting black holed (they filled out the paperwork/forms, but didn’t get back responses). This was a point of frustration and a reason why at least one person didn’t get involved further. That particular case should be rectified, though—thanks Marta!
“And true to form, we even have a mailing list.” Does anyone use this? I guess I should probably sign up….
“One challenge I've seen is that many academics aren't that familiar with open source in general - and aren't motivated to do more than public their papers and proof of concept code, since they are rewards for publishing, not for solving problems (at the risk of gross over-generalization).” This is certainly true for people that sit at their desk and do math all day. However, it’s far from the truth for good systems researchers. This point from Brian actually got brought up at the Dagstuhl seminar, but people didn’t agree. Mike Franklin (chair of the CS department at the U of Chicago) pointed out that he always liked to have his group contribute things back because it allowed them to find future research problems in a way that just writing the paper and going away did not. However, I will agree that most academics aren’t familiar with open source—other than Shahan Khatchadourian (of PegaSys), I think I was the only other person at this seminar with open-source experience, and most people were totally clueless. I think this means that we have an education issue with the blockchain research community.
From Chris’s email:
“What I would recommend is that we, as the TSC, take a hard look at contributor on-boarding of the various projects, suggest improvements to, or alignment of, the various projects processes and documentation and take a look at the various ways that a new user engages in Hyperledger generally to make sure that we are being as effective as possible in capturing new contributors.” I agree 100%. Even just posting the text from this email on the university page would be a good start!
From Vipin’s email:
“Please start a rocketchat channel called #research and publicise.” I’d support this as well.
From Dan’s email:
“Most if not all projects have contributors meetings listed on the HL calendar and CONTRIBUTING.md in the repos. Sawtooth’s for example points to: https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/community.html.” When people asked about contacting the maintainers or contributing, I mentioned this. No one was aware that these kind of files existed. There was also confusion related to the calendar—people weren’t sure which meetings they needed to attend. There are tons of meetings on the calendar these days! Some clarity on these would be great.
“Totally agree with Chris that another meeting group isn’t the best way to bridge the initial gap. In fact, I think siphoning that new-contributor interest into a meeting group is likely to be counterproductive.” I don’t agree with this. I think creating a group for researchers is likely to spur more researchers to attend and get involved rather than siphon away people. Ideally such a group would lower the activation energy for researchers to get involved and contribute and, in the long run, funnel them into the projects. I wouldn’t want to suggest a frequent or work-heavy meeting group—just discussions either biweekly or monthly. Can you explain your thought process more on this (i.e. tell me why I’m wrong ;))?
From Vipin’s next email:
“We have had several suggestions.” These are good ideas.
From Mark’s email:
“FWIW, the PSWG has three members* who were in academia and contributed to our first Metrics document. One of these folks also is a Caliper maintainer now.” There were several people at the seminar interested in Caliper. I suspect that it would be a big beneficiary of more academic involvement.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I didn’t expect this to spur so much discussion, but I think it is something that, if we address properly, could really benefit Hyperledger. Thanks again for reading, and have a great day.
Thanks, Hart
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Upcoming Event: Hyperledger Sawtooth Quarterly Update Due #tsc-project-update - Thu, 07/11/2019
#tsc-project-update
#cal-reminder
tsc@lists.hyperledger.org Calendar <tsc@...>
Reminder: Hyperledger Sawtooth Quarterly Update Due #tsc-project-update When: Thursday, 11 July 2019 Organizer: community-architects@... Description: The Hyperledger Sawtooth update to the TSC was due 8 July, 2019, and it will be presented to the TSC on 11 July, 2019. Please review the update at TSC Project Updates prior to the meeting and add your questions to the update.
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Upcoming Event: Hyperledger Architecture WG Quarterly Update Due #tsc-wg-update - Thu, 07/11/2019
#cal-reminder
#tsc-wg-update
tsc@lists.hyperledger.org Calendar <tsc@...>
Reminder: Hyperledger Architecture WG Quarterly Update Due #tsc-wg-update When: Thursday, 11 July 2019 Organizer: community-architects@... Description: The Hyperledger Architecture WG update to the TSC was due 8 July, 2019, and it will be reviewed by the TSC on 11 July, 2019. Please review the update at TSC Working Group Updates prior to the meeting and add your questions to the update.
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DCI working group proposal
Middleton, Dan <dan.middleton@...>
Near the end of 2018 there were some discussions on TSC calls about having a Community Health Working Group or Task Force. Feedback at the time was that the idea needed to be developed further, so a group of people interested in this topic has been meeting since then to evolve the concept. Following several months of work, that group proposes creating a community-led Diversity, Civility, and Inclusion (DCI) Working Group.
The full proposal for the working group is here: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/HYP/Diversity+Civility+and+Inclusion+Working+Group
We invite your review and feedback.
Thanks, DCI Working Group Proposers
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[Smart Contracts Working Group] - Submitting "Smart Contracts Taxonomy" work product for Review
Hi all,
After announcing to the TSC during Q1 update for a new complete work product called “Smart Contracts Taxonomy”, I am in the pleasant position to submit it for review in order to become formal and published. I would like to let you know that our WG members were informed through the mailing list and rocket chat channel to participate, contribute and review it. We discussed and reviewed it on two subsequent WG meetings and we would like to get feedback and additions/corrections from everybody. The complete product is formed of a conceptual map and a table reflecting the mind map’s bubbles (concepts) in a more compact and readable way.
Please visit the link on our wiki page “Smart Contracts Taxonomy [REVIEW]” here https://wiki.hyperledger.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=6424415 where you can find them.
I want to thank this active and highly skilled Hyperledger community for participating and contributing their knowledge and precious time for this and all the other work in progress. I am sure you will make the review process even more beneficial for all of us!
Best Regards, Sofia Terzi --- Blockchain Solutions Architect MSc. | Chair of Hyperledger Smart Contracts WG Information Technologies Institute – CERTH - https://www.iti.gr 6th km Harilaou - Thermi, 57001, Thessaloniki, Greece
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Re: contributing to Hyperledger projects
Christopher Ferris <chrisfer@...>
+1
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
Cheers, Christopher Ferris IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology IBM Digital Business Group, Open Technologies email: chrisfer@... twitter: @christo4ferris IBM Open Source white paper: https://developer.ibm.com/articles/cl-open-architecture-update/ phone: +1 508 667 0402
On Jul 2, 2019, at 4:38 PM, Ry Jones <rjones@...> wrote:
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Re: Create a new project proposal
arain_sq@...
Hi Hart，
You are right, this is a fabric-specific proposal, and we welcome anyone to comment on it. Thanks， Arain
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Re: contributing to Hyperledger projects
Sounds perfect. Here are some more ideas that have proved very useful in linux kernel maintainer ship:
This should show a commitment from the projects that contributions will be seriously considered. Sean
On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 8:37 PM Christopher Ferris <chrisfer@...> wrote:
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Re: contributing to Hyperledger projects
Christopher Ferris <chris.ferris@...>
totally
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
Chris
On Jul 2, 2019, at 5:07 PM, "hmontgomery@..." <hmontgomery@...> wrote:
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Re: Create a new project proposal
hmontgomery@us.fujitsu.com <hmontgomery@...>
This looks like a Fabric-specific proposal. Can any of the Fabric maintainers comment on this?
Thanks, Hart
From: tsc@... [mailto:tsc@...]
On Behalf Of arain_sq@...
Hi Everyone, Thanks
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Re: contributing to Hyperledger projects
hmontgomery@us.fujitsu.com <hmontgomery@...>
+1 to this. I think it captures my sentiments on the general problem really well.
“I'm an introvert, and I really don't want to ask anyone for help.”
You could probably have a whole different (but similar) story on the difficulty in asking for and getting help, as well.
Thanks, Hart
From: tsc@... [mailto:tsc@...]
On Behalf Of Christopher Ferris
Hart's note has me thinking about how we make on-boarding more obvious and accessible for new comers.
Let's say that I want to contribute to Hyperledger, but don't know where to start, and am not familiar with open source culture and operations. I think it is worthwhile for people to follow this thought experiment.
I hear about Hyperledger, and want to get involved. I point my browser at www.hyperledger.org. The site loads and I see in the main banner three tiles. One is a case study of Fabric in action. The middle one is how to join as a member. The right-most tile has Transact. Cool! And look! There's a "Start Contributing" button! <click> My browser takes me to a crates.io page for Transact (we aren't in Kansas anymore, Toto!) but there is something here that tells me "How to Participate", but TBH not much more than a nice welcome message inviting contributions, and a link to the mailing list and chat (to which you would have to figure out how to login).
I click on a link to one of the repositories and the README.md basically has the very same information. Now I need to ask someone how this actually works for me to make a contribution. There is a link on the crates.io page to the transact-rfcs repository, but no information about how to submit one, nor are there any samples for me to follow.
I'm an introvert, and I really don't want to ask anyone for help. I'll move on and look for something else to do.
Now, I don't want to be picking on Transact. It's a brand new project still in the process of getting off the ground. Only got the repositories established a few days ago.
However, my point here is that Hyperledger as a whole *does* need to think about this sort of thing and should be ensuring that we have a path for people to follow to getting involved that does not lead to a dead end. That path should help people understand that there are multiple projects, each with their own governance, but generally conforming to a high level pattern. If someone is new to open source, maybe some pointers as to where they might learn about how open source works generally.
Yes, I do realize that there's the greenhouse graphic below the three tiles and each of the projects is a hotlink to the respective project page. However, there is no visual cue to let me know that that is below the fold, at least not on my viewport on my MBP13".
As for our top-level projects, seems to me that a certain amount of consistency would go a long way to helping people navigate. Things like requiring a CONTRIBUTING.md in the root of the repositories for a project. A MAINTAINERS.md for the list of maintainers. A README.md that links to both, and provides a bit of guidance as to how to navigate the code base, how to install, where to find samples, who to engage if you get stuck. I'm sure there are other ideas people may have to add to the list of required or recommended content.
I think that we (TSC) should work to establish these norms that we expect in all of the project repositories (certainly for projects seeking to graduate from Incubation). We also need to work with Marketing to ensure that there is a short path from the main www.hyperledger.org page that helps people a) find the projects, b) find the code to run, and c) learn how to contribute (or lurk as the case may be) with the fewest possible number of clicks and the least amount of scrolling.
Cheers, IBM Open Source white paper:
https://developer.ibm.com/articles/cl-open-architecture-update/
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Re: contributing to Hyperledger projects
Along the same lines, I was reading a post yesterday than mentioned using repolinter to pick those issues up. There is a lot to digest in the blog post about how Microsoft manages 25k GitHub-using employees; eventually, I'd like to steal more of the tooling that they use and apply it here. Ry
On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 1:16 PM Shawn Amundson <amundson@...> wrote:
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Re: contributing to Hyperledger projects
Shawn Amundson
+1 For contributing, establishing a "help wanted" or similar list within JIRA for each project would also help for developers who want to contribute but aren't sure where to start. Unfortunately, it is hard to maintain such a list over time (they tend to get outdated without a lot of grooming). re:Transact specifically - I'll create a PR to add CONTRIBUTING.md. You have me second-guessing the crates.io link, that was my idea but maybe a bad one; we could link it back to the main repo. For the RFC repo - I'll submit PRs soon to initialize it to look similar to what exists in sawtooth-rfcs (https://github.com/hyperledger/sawtooth-rfcs/)--which includes the process description. Having CONTRIBUTING.md, README.md, and MAINTAINERS.md consistently answer the same question across projects will help existing developers move between projects as well. -Shawn
On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 2:37 PM Christopher Ferris <chrisfer@...> wrote:
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contributing to Hyperledger projects
Christopher Ferris <chrisfer@...>
Hart's note has me thinking about how we make on-boarding more obvious and accessible for new comers.
Let's say that I want to contribute to Hyperledger, but don't know where to start, and am not familiar with open source culture and operations. I think it is worthwhile for people to follow this thought experiment.
I hear about Hyperledger, and want to get involved. I point my browser at www.hyperledger.org. The site loads and I see in the main banner three tiles. One is a case study of Fabric in action. The middle one is how to join as a member. The right-most tile has Transact. Cool! And look! There's a "Start Contributing" button! <click> My browser takes me to a crates.io page for Transact (we aren't in Kansas anymore, Toto!) but there is something here that tells me "How to Participate", but TBH not much more than a nice welcome message inviting contributions, and a link to the mailing list and chat (to which you would have to figure out how to login).
I click on a link to one of the repositories and the README.md basically has the very same information. Now I need to ask someone how this actually works for me to make a contribution. There is a link on the crates.io page to the transact-rfcs repository, but no information about how to submit one, nor are there any samples for me to follow.
I'm an introvert, and I really don't want to ask anyone for help. I'll move on and look for something else to do.
Now, I don't want to be picking on Transact. It's a brand new project still in the process of getting off the ground. Only got the repositories established a few days ago.
However, my point here is that Hyperledger as a whole *does* need to think about this sort of thing and should be ensuring that we have a path for people to follow to getting involved that does not lead to a dead end. That path should help people understand that there are multiple projects, each with their own governance, but generally conforming to a high level pattern. If someone is new to open source, maybe some pointers as to where they might learn about how open source works generally.
Yes, I do realize that there's the greenhouse graphic below the three tiles and each of the projects is a hotlink to the respective project page. However, there is no visual cue to let me know that that is below the fold, at least not on my viewport on my MBP13".
As for our top-level projects, seems to me that a certain amount of consistency would go a long way to helping people navigate. Things like requiring a CONTRIBUTING.md in the root of the repositories for a project. A MAINTAINERS.md for the list of maintainers. A README.md that links to both, and provides a bit of guidance as to how to navigate the code base, how to install, where to find samples, who to engage if you get stuck. I'm sure there are other ideas people may have to add to the list of required or recommended content.
I think that we (TSC) should work to establish these norms that we expect in all of the project repositories (certainly for projects seeking to graduate from Incubation). We also need to work with Marketing to ensure that there is a short path from the main www.hyperledger.org page that helps people a) find the projects, b) find the code to run, and c) learn how to contribute (or lurk as the case may be) with the fewest possible number of clicks and the least amount of scrolling.
Cheers,
Christopher Ferris IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology email: chrisfer@... twitter: @christo4ferris IBM Open Source white paper: https://developer.ibm.com/articles/cl-open-architecture-update/ phone: +1 508 667 0402
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Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
hmontgomery@us.fujitsu.com <hmontgomery@...>
Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all of the responses to my initial email. Rather than respond to all of them individually, I’ll try to address some points below. Hopefully this will be easier to follow than many different follow-ups.
From Virgil’s email:
When Ethereum had this same problem, we started the https://ethresear.ch messageboard to discuss problems and papers. Something similar might be useful to Hyperledger.” I agree!
From Brian’s email:
“We have long believed we need to engage academia, and have a formal process for doing so…” I spoke to people who tried to start this formal process and ended up somehow getting black holed (they filled out the paperwork/forms, but didn’t get back responses). This was a point of frustration and a reason why at least one person didn’t get involved further. That particular case should be rectified, though—thanks Marta!
“And true to form, we even have a mailing list.” Does anyone use this? I guess I should probably sign up….
“One challenge I've seen is that many academics aren't that familiar with open source in general - and aren't motivated to do more than public their papers and proof of concept code, since they are rewards for publishing, not for solving problems (at the risk of gross over-generalization).” This is certainly true for people that sit at their desk and do math all day. However, it’s far from the truth for good systems researchers. This point from Brian actually got brought up at the Dagstuhl seminar, but people didn’t agree. Mike Franklin (chair of the CS department at the U of Chicago) pointed out that he always liked to have his group contribute things back because it allowed them to find future research problems in a way that just writing the paper and going away did not. However, I will agree that most academics aren’t familiar with open source—other than Shahan Khatchadourian (of PegaSys), I think I was the only other person at this seminar with open-source experience, and most people were totally clueless. I think this means that we have an education issue with the blockchain research community.
From Chris’s email:
“What I would recommend is that we, as the TSC, take a hard look at contributor on-boarding of the various projects, suggest improvements to, or alignment of, the various projects processes and documentation and take a look at the various ways that a new user engages in Hyperledger generally to make sure that we are being as effective as possible in capturing new contributors.” I agree 100%. Even just posting the text from this email on the university page would be a good start!
From Vipin’s email:
“Please start a rocketchat channel called #research and publicise.” I’d support this as well.
From Dan’s email:
“Most if not all projects have contributors meetings listed on the HL calendar and CONTRIBUTING.md in the repos. Sawtooth’s for example points to: https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/community.html.” When people asked about contacting the maintainers or contributing, I mentioned this. No one was aware that these kind of files existed. There was also confusion related to the calendar—people weren’t sure which meetings they needed to attend. There are tons of meetings on the calendar these days! Some clarity on these would be great.
“Totally agree with Chris that another meeting group isn’t the best way to bridge the initial gap. In fact, I think siphoning that new-contributor interest into a meeting group is likely to be counterproductive.” I don’t agree with this. I think creating a group for researchers is likely to spur more researchers to attend and get involved rather than siphon away people. Ideally such a group would lower the activation energy for researchers to get involved and contribute and, in the long run, funnel them into the projects. I wouldn’t want to suggest a frequent or work-heavy meeting group—just discussions either biweekly or monthly. Can you explain your thought process more on this (i.e. tell me why I’m wrong ;))?
From Vipin’s next email:
“We have had several suggestions.” These are good ideas.
From Mark’s email:
“FWIW, the PSWG has three members* who were in academia and contributed to our first Metrics document. One of these folks also is a Caliper maintainer now.” There were several people at the seminar interested in Caliper. I suspect that it would be a big beneficiary of more academic involvement.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I didn’t expect this to spur so much discussion, but I think it is something that, if we address properly, could really benefit Hyperledger. Thanks again for reading, and have a great day.
Thanks, Hart
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Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Marta, Hyperledger Princeton / Ledger Academy is attempting to bring local business and Academia together by offering a Blockchain Summer Project. We are lucky enough to be locate across the street from Princeton University and our Princeton meetup has a nice mix of students, business and technology folks. The project involves creating a supply chain blockchain to assist in local charity donation transfers. You can follow the project on the following wiki page: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/LMDWG/SUMMER+PROJECT+IDEAS At everyMeetup we encourage participates to get a login and get active by following the steps on the LMDWG NEW MEMBER PAGE: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/LMDWG/New+Member+Welcome+Page The page instructs on how to : Getting a Linux Login
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Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
mark wagner <mwagner@...>
Great topic Hart! FWIW, the PSWG has three members* who were in academia and contributed to our first Metrics document. One of these folks also is a Caliper maintainer now. In general I think its a great idea to reach out to universities and collaborate where ever possible. The Open Source education issue may be something that we can look at across LF in general. Brian, CAs, are there other LF projects that have already looked (are looking) at this, etc ? That said, how to contribute shouldn't really be too different for academia vs a new contributor who does not have much in the way of open source experience. Open Source is not just a license model, its a mindset ! -mark ------------ Red Hat, Inc * one messed up and has recently earned his PhD and now has work for a living ;)
-- Mark Wagner Senior Principal Software Engineer
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