On 7/2/19 5:13 AM, Christopher Ferris wrote:

We have a public roadmap [4] in JIRA which admittedly, because of the LFIT rules about access to the tooling is sometimes difficult to access without an LFIT login, but it is documented in the CONTRIBUTING GUIDELINES and also in the Wiki.

[4] https://jira.hyperledger.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10104

To clarify the above URL does not require a LFIT login to access, nor to view any public Jira issue.

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.

+1, HL staff is here to help with that too.  Clarity around how to get involved, like performance or out-of-the-box-experience, is something that can never not be improved.  :)  We welcome edits or specific suggestions to the wiki to help with that. 

It might be useful to make contributions a bit more prominent on the Universities page. There's a single link on that page to the community page, and not a whole lot to guide the individual from there if they are unfamiliar with open source.

I believe the concern would be keeping content current as methods of contribution evolve - better not to replicate what's already available on another page.  Is there a better starting place to send them to, or a better way to describe what's behind the link?

Brian

-- 
Brian Behlendorf
Executive Director, Hyperledger
bbehlendorf@...
Twitter: @brianbehlendorf

----- Original message -----
From: "hmontgomery@..." <hmontgomery@...>
Sent by: tsc@...
To: "tsc@..." <tsc@...>
Cc:
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Hyperledger TSC] Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Date: Mon, Jul 1, 2019 9:45 PM
 

Hi Everyone,

 

I spent last week at a Dagstuhl seminar on permissioned blockchain (thanks Mic for getting me the invitation!).  If you aren’t aware what this is, it is basically an unstructured week at a German castle in the middle of nowhere talking about research problems in a particular area of computer science (in this case, permissioned blockchain).  So, basically it’s nerd camp for adults—your mileage may vary, but I thought it was really fun.

 

As you all might expect, Hyperledger came up quite a bit in discussions.  In fact, Fabric seemed to be the most talked about (and built upon) system.  I had no idea that there were this many people across the world in academia working on things related to Hyperledger (it seems to be the case that blockchain papers are being sent to a very wide variety of conferences so it is hard to follow).  In particular, Hyperledger has captured a lot of interest in the database community which I did not expect or know about until last week.  The fact that Hyperledger has caught on in parts of the academic community was really encouraging.  Some of the academic work included direct building on Hyperledger (like the fast Fabric paper—one of the authors was there), while other work used, say, Fabric, as a way to test the performance of new algorithms.  For instance, multiple people reported BFT algorithm tests in terms of Fabric performance.

 

However, there were some notable issues:  pretty much all of the participants didn’t know how to contribute their work back to Hyperledger!  Those that had contacted people found the contribution process difficult, thought it was hard to get started, and didn’t know who to talk to about issues in the process.  Many of these people were not just coming with algorithms on pencil and paper—they had modified versions of, say, Fabric running with their implementation changes, and performance numbers to boot!  Several groups said that they tried to get involved and contribute, but one or more hurdles stopped the process.

 

It struck me as particularly wasteful that we did not have an efficient way to get these folks involved in Hyperledger.  Given that many of these research groups already had working code, it seemed like it should be easy to incorporate these changes, but it wasn’t happening.  In particular, I think this was due to the fact that most people had never worked with an open source organization before and were not aware of how things worked.

 

With this in mind, I’d like to suggest we create a forum for Hyperledger research-related activities.  I’m not sure whether this should be a working group, SIG, or something else entirely, but I think we should have a biweekly (or perhaps monthly) meeting where researchers could talk about their work and get feedback on how to contribute the results of their research back into the Hyperledger code bases.  In addition to helping researchers contribute code, we could potentially do more:  we could have engineers talk about interesting problems they face that might be good for research, and researchers present solutions to problems (or efficiency/security improvements) that could be implemented to improve the various Hyperledger projects.

 

I asked people at the seminar if they would be interested in joining something like this, and roughly half of the 30 participants expressed interest in joining.  So I think we would have a pretty substantial crowd.

 

What do people think about this?  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to best implement this idea?  Again, it seems very wasteful not to help these researchers (and potential contributors) get involved.

 

Thanks a lot for your time, and have a great day.

 

Thanks,

Hart

----- Original message -----
From: "Brian Behlendorf" <bbehlendorf@...>
Sent by: tsc@...
To: tsc@...
Cc: Marta Piekarska <mpiekarska@...>, David Boswell <dboswell@...>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Hyperledger TSC] Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Date: Tue, Jul 2, 2019 2:30 AM
 

Terrific write-up, thank you Hart!

 

We have long believed we need to engage academia, and have a formal process for doing so:

 

https://www.hyperledger.org/resources/universities

 

and have signed up 18 different universities across US, Europe and China as free associate members:

 

https://www.hyperledger.org/members (at the bottom)

Infomal engagement is just as important:

https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/CP/Academic+and+Associate+collaboration

 

And true to form, we even have a mailing list:

 

https://lists.hyperledger.org/g/universities

 

 

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).  We all know that producing runtime code that people can depend upon is only partly about novel solutions to a problem, it's also about hardening and handling edge cases and the like.  Also, I'm not sure most projects would want the fruits of a research project if it was handed off with a presumption that the maintainers will bear the burden of maintenance going forward.  So many of our (HL staff's) engagement with academia has been about what it means to participate in an open source community.  For some that comes across as "too much work", though.

 

At any rate I'm excited to hear there's people doing research on Hyperledger we might not have known about and can approach to engage in this way - with their permission, please share their contact details with David and Marta cc'd on this note and we can wrap them into existing efforts.  And if you or other folks on this list want to help us bridge this gap we'd love the help.

 

Thanks!

 

Brian

 

 

On 7/1/19 6:45 PM, hmontgomery@... wrote:

Hi Everyone,

 

I spent last week at a Dagstuhl seminar on permissioned blockchain (thanks Mic for getting me the invitation!).  If you aren’t aware what this is, it is basically an unstructured week at a German castle in the middle of nowhere talking about research problems in a particular area of computer science (in this case, permissioned blockchain).  So, basically it’s nerd camp for adults—your mileage may vary, but I thought it was really fun.

 

As you all might expect, Hyperledger came up quite a bit in discussions.  In fact, Fabric seemed to be the most talked about (and built upon) system.  I had no idea that there were this many people across the world in academia working on things related to Hyperledger (it seems to be the case that blockchain papers are being sent to a very wide variety of conferences so it is hard to follow).  In particular, Hyperledger has captured a lot of interest in the database community which I did not expect or know about until last week.  The fact that Hyperledger has caught on in parts of the academic community was really encouraging.  Some of the academic work included direct building on Hyperledger (like the fast Fabric paper—one of the authors was there), while other work used, say, Fabric, as a way to test the performance of new algorithms.  For instance, multiple people reported BFT algorithm tests in terms of Fabric performance.

 

However, there were some notable issues:  pretty much all of the participants didn’t know how to contribute their work back to Hyperledger!  Those that had contacted people found the contribution process difficult, thought it was hard to get started, and didn’t know who to talk to about issues in the process.  Many of these people were not just coming with algorithms on pencil and paper—they had modified versions of, say, Fabric running with their implementation changes, and performance numbers to boot!  Several groups said that they tried to get involved and contribute, but one or more hurdles stopped the process.

 

It struck me as particularly wasteful that we did not have an efficient way to get these folks involved in Hyperledger.  Given that many of these research groups already had working code, it seemed like it should be easy to incorporate these changes, but it wasn’t happening.  In particular, I think this was due to the fact that most people had never worked with an open source organization before and were not aware of how things worked.

 

With this in mind, I’d like to suggest we create a forum for Hyperledger research-related activities.  I’m not sure whether this should be a working group, SIG, or something else entirely, but I think we should have a biweekly (or perhaps monthly) meeting where researchers could talk about their work and get feedback on how to contribute the results of their research back into the Hyperledger code bases.  In addition to helping researchers contribute code, we could potentially do more:  we could have engineers talk about interesting problems they face that might be good for research, and researchers present solutions to problems (or efficiency/security improvements) that could be implemented to improve the various Hyperledger projects.

 

I asked people at the seminar if they would be interested in joining something like this, and roughly half of the 30 participants expressed interest in joining.  So I think we would have a pretty substantial crowd.

 

What do people think about this?  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to best implement this idea?  Again, it seems very wasteful not to help these researchers (and potential contributors) get involved.

 

Thanks a lot for your time, and have a great day.

 

Thanks,

Hart

 

--
Brian Behlendorf
Executive Director, Hyperledger
bbehlendorf@...
Twitter: @brianbehlendorf

----- Original message -----
From: "Brian Behlendorf" <bbehlendorf@...>
Sent by: tsc@...
To: tsc@...
Cc: Marta Piekarska <mpiekarska@...>, David Boswell <dboswell@...>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Hyperledger TSC] Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Date: Tue, Jul 2, 2019 2:30 AM
 

Terrific write-up, thank you Hart!

 

We have long believed we need to engage academia, and have a formal process for doing so:

 

https://www.hyperledger.org/resources/universities

 

and have signed up 18 different universities across US, Europe and China as free associate members:

 

https://www.hyperledger.org/members (at the bottom)

Infomal engagement is just as important:

https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/CP/Academic+and+Associate+collaboration

 

And true to form, we even have a mailing list:

 

https://lists.hyperledger.org/g/universities

 

 

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).  We all know that producing runtime code that people can depend upon is only partly about novel solutions to a problem, it's also about hardening and handling edge cases and the like.  Also, I'm not sure most projects would want the fruits of a research project if it was handed off with a presumption that the maintainers will bear the burden of maintenance going forward.  So many of our (HL staff's) engagement with academia has been about what it means to participate in an open source community.  For some that comes across as "too much work", though.

 

At any rate I'm excited to hear there's people doing research on Hyperledger we might not have known about and can approach to engage in this way - with their permission, please share their contact details with David and Marta cc'd on this note and we can wrap them into existing efforts.  And if you or other folks on this list want to help us bridge this gap we'd love the help.

 

Thanks!

 

Brian

 

 

On 7/1/19 6:45 PM, hmontgomery@... wrote:

Hi Everyone,

 

I spent last week at a Dagstuhl seminar on permissioned blockchain (thanks Mic for getting me the invitation!).  If you aren’t aware what this is, it is basically an unstructured week at a German castle in the middle of nowhere talking about research problems in a particular area of computer science (in this case, permissioned blockchain).  So, basically it’s nerd camp for adults—your mileage may vary, but I thought it was really fun.

 

As you all might expect, Hyperledger came up quite a bit in discussions.  In fact, Fabric seemed to be the most talked about (and built upon) system.  I had no idea that there were this many people across the world in academia working on things related to Hyperledger (it seems to be the case that blockchain papers are being sent to a very wide variety of conferences so it is hard to follow).  In particular, Hyperledger has captured a lot of interest in the database community which I did not expect or know about until last week.  The fact that Hyperledger has caught on in parts of the academic community was really encouraging.  Some of the academic work included direct building on Hyperledger (like the fast Fabric paper—one of the authors was there), while other work used, say, Fabric, as a way to test the performance of new algorithms.  For instance, multiple people reported BFT algorithm tests in terms of Fabric performance.

 

However, there were some notable issues:  pretty much all of the participants didn’t know how to contribute their work back to Hyperledger!  Those that had contacted people found the contribution process difficult, thought it was hard to get started, and didn’t know who to talk to about issues in the process.  Many of these people were not just coming with algorithms on pencil and paper—they had modified versions of, say, Fabric running with their implementation changes, and performance numbers to boot!  Several groups said that they tried to get involved and contribute, but one or more hurdles stopped the process.

 

It struck me as particularly wasteful that we did not have an efficient way to get these folks involved in Hyperledger.  Given that many of these research groups already had working code, it seemed like it should be easy to incorporate these changes, but it wasn’t happening.  In particular, I think this was due to the fact that most people had never worked with an open source organization before and were not aware of how things worked.

 

With this in mind, I’d like to suggest we create a forum for Hyperledger research-related activities.  I’m not sure whether this should be a working group, SIG, or something else entirely, but I think we should have a biweekly (or perhaps monthly) meeting where researchers could talk about their work and get feedback on how to contribute the results of their research back into the Hyperledger code bases.  In addition to helping researchers contribute code, we could potentially do more:  we could have engineers talk about interesting problems they face that might be good for research, and researchers present solutions to problems (or efficiency/security improvements) that could be implemented to improve the various Hyperledger projects.

 

I asked people at the seminar if they would be interested in joining something like this, and roughly half of the 30 participants expressed interest in joining.  So I think we would have a pretty substantial crowd.

 

What do people think about this?  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to best implement this idea?  Again, it seems very wasteful not to help these researchers (and potential contributors) get involved.

 

Thanks a lot for your time, and have a great day.

 

Thanks,

Hart

 

--
Brian Behlendorf
Executive Director, Hyperledger
bbehlendorf@...
Twitter: @brianbehlendorf

----- Original message -----
From: "hmontgomery@..." <hmontgomery@...>
Sent by: tsc@...
To: "tsc@..." <tsc@...>
Cc:
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Hyperledger TSC] Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Date: Mon, Jul 1, 2019 9:45 PM
 

Hi Everyone,

 

I spent last week at a Dagstuhl seminar on permissioned blockchain (thanks Mic for getting me the invitation!).  If you aren’t aware what this is, it is basically an unstructured week at a German castle in the middle of nowhere talking about research problems in a particular area of computer science (in this case, permissioned blockchain).  So, basically it’s nerd camp for adults—your mileage may vary, but I thought it was really fun.

 

As you all might expect, Hyperledger came up quite a bit in discussions.  In fact, Fabric seemed to be the most talked about (and built upon) system.  I had no idea that there were this many people across the world in academia working on things related to Hyperledger (it seems to be the case that blockchain papers are being sent to a very wide variety of conferences so it is hard to follow).  In particular, Hyperledger has captured a lot of interest in the database community which I did not expect or know about until last week.  The fact that Hyperledger has caught on in parts of the academic community was really encouraging.  Some of the academic work included direct building on Hyperledger (like the fast Fabric paper—one of the authors was there), while other work used, say, Fabric, as a way to test the performance of new algorithms.  For instance, multiple people reported BFT algorithm tests in terms of Fabric performance.

 

However, there were some notable issues:  pretty much all of the participants didn’t know how to contribute their work back to Hyperledger!  Those that had contacted people found the contribution process difficult, thought it was hard to get started, and didn’t know who to talk to about issues in the process.  Many of these people were not just coming with algorithms on pencil and paper—they had modified versions of, say, Fabric running with their implementation changes, and performance numbers to boot!  Several groups said that they tried to get involved and contribute, but one or more hurdles stopped the process.

 

It struck me as particularly wasteful that we did not have an efficient way to get these folks involved in Hyperledger.  Given that many of these research groups already had working code, it seemed like it should be easy to incorporate these changes, but it wasn’t happening.  In particular, I think this was due to the fact that most people had never worked with an open source organization before and were not aware of how things worked.

 

With this in mind, I’d like to suggest we create a forum for Hyperledger research-related activities.  I’m not sure whether this should be a working group, SIG, or something else entirely, but I think we should have a biweekly (or perhaps monthly) meeting where researchers could talk about their work and get feedback on how to contribute the results of their research back into the Hyperledger code bases.  In addition to helping researchers contribute code, we could potentially do more:  we could have engineers talk about interesting problems they face that might be good for research, and researchers present solutions to problems (or efficiency/security improvements) that could be implemented to improve the various Hyperledger projects.

 

I asked people at the seminar if they would be interested in joining something like this, and roughly half of the 30 participants expressed interest in joining.  So I think we would have a pretty substantial crowd.

 

What do people think about this?  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to best implement this idea?  Again, it seems very wasteful not to help these researchers (and potential contributors) get involved.

 

Thanks a lot for your time, and have a great day.

 

Thanks,

Hart

All,

I propose turning on the two factor auth requirement for the Hyperledger Labs organization on 03 JULY 2019. What I learned from enabling the requirement on the main Hyperledger org is that when a person is re-invited, it is very easy to return the previous permissions and settings to the user. In fact, it is the default.

Thoughts?

Ry

--

Ry Jones

Community Architect, Hyperledger

Chat: @rjones