Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Marta Piekarska <mpiekarska@...>
Thank you everyone, these are great ideas. I have been in touch with folks at Digital Assets who are running an Academic Program, and would love to hear if anyone else’s company has such an initiative. Ideally we can team up and have
joint projects and research ideas we can suggest to academics.
Maybe, to boost activity on the universities mailing list we can move the discussion there?
Have a great day
m
Marta Piekarska
Director of Ecosystem, Hyperledger
SCHEDULE A MEETING WITH ME: calendly.com/mpiekarska
marta@...
+447802336641 (U.K) - Signal and Whatsapp
Wickr: martap
Skype: martapiekarska
Based in the U.K.
From: tsc@... on behalf of Salman Baset <salman.a.baset@...>
Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2019 5:40 pm
To: Brian Behlendorf
Cc: tsc@...
Subject: Re: [Hyperledger TSC] Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Perhaps, another light weight approach might be to create a list of academic projects using Hyperledger on the Hyperledger website. The requirement for adding to such a list can be as simple as a web page on a university website that describes the project.
While incentives may not be aligned for every academic (faculty/student) to contribute to Hyperledger projects, probably every academic will like to see their project linked off a page on the Hyperledger website.
Salman
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
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
|
|
Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Perhaps, another light weight approach might be to create a list of academic projects using Hyperledger on the Hyperledger website. The requirement for adding to such a list can be as simple as a web page on a university website that describes the project. While incentives may not be aligned for every academic (faculty/student) to contribute to Hyperledger projects, probably every academic will like to see their project linked off a page on the Hyperledger website.
Salman
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
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
|
|
Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
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
|
|
Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Middleton, Dan <dan.middleton@...>
+1 Chris
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
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.
Regards,
Dan Middleton
Intel Principal Engineer
From: <tsc@...> on behalf of Christopher Ferris <chrisfer@...>
Date: Tuesday, July 2, 2019 at 7:13 AM
To: "hmontgomery@..." <hmontgomery@...>
Cc: "tsc@..." <tsc@...>
Subject: Re: [Hyperledger TSC] Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Hart, thanks for the note and the suggestion. I am not sure that creating yet another SIG is the answer to improving how we communicate how to contribute to the various projects,
though.
The ROE for contributing to Hyperledger Fabric are well documented in the CONTRIBUTING [1] guide in the Fabric documentation, and linked from the Hyperledger project page [5],
Wiki [2] and GitHub [3].
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.
We have a bi-weekly Maintainers meeting in the Hyperledger calendar and listed on the Wiki and the CONTRIBUTING guide where we review the roadmap and invite others to come
and make proposals for new features/development.
Now, is using Gerrit and JIRA easy peasey? Admittedly, not initially, but the documentation to get someone started are pretty clear and in fact consistent with other major
projects that leverage Gerrit (in fact we also link to other sites that had awesome getting started material). Frankly, once you have the git hooks in place, it is a snap. There is also RocketChat and email with plenty of people there to help with any getting
started hiccups. There are also the Hyperledger Community Architects, though IMO that role could be a bit more visible and even directly accessible off of the hyperledger.org project pages.
Could the material be improved? Of course, in fact, making suggestions as to HOW it could be improved would be an awesome initial contribution, especially if by someone who
struggled. The whole idea behind open source is to have continuous improvement by those interested in the project.
I do know that the Fast Fabric team had connected with the Fabric Maintainers. They presented their findings to the Fabric Maintainers call, and received very positive feedback
and encouragement to contribute. What I think we had was a situation of incompatible expectations. We were expecting the Fast Fabric team to pull from their work and make incremental CRs to Fabric through the documented process, where I think that they thought
the members of the Fabric community would do that. We also connected via IBM Research, and maybe we could/should have had one or more of the maintainers engaged directly.
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.
Cheers,
Christopher Ferris
IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology
email: chrisfer@...
twitter: @christo4ferris
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
----- 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
|
|
Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger

VIPIN BHARATHAN
Hi,
Hart has a point. We could have a SIG that brings together engineers and researchers. Well advertised presentations could draw practitioners who are wrestling with one problem or the other.
Sometimes ideas sparked from universities have carried on to become very relevant and ground-breaking advances. With involvement from the original researchers.
Google, for example was started by researchers. There are plenty of examples of transitions from universities to the real world.
My own interests have been piqued by FastFabric and the work that Christian Gorenson et. al. have done first with respect to a limited PoC, then the work on Fabric 1.4 - my own angle is to generalize this concept to multiple DLT designs, either being worked
on or seen in the wild.
Please start a rocketchat channel called #research and publicise. That might help.
The universities mailing list only has posts from the LF staff and that too very low volume. Mostly about conference announcements.
Best,
Vipin
Vipin
Bharathan
Enterprise Blockchain Consultant
vip@...
From: tsc@... <tsc@...> on behalf of Christopher Ferris via Lists.Hyperledger.Org <chrisfer=us.ibm.com@...>
Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2019 8:50 AM
To: bbehlendorf@...
Cc: tsc@...
Subject: Re: [Hyperledger TSC] Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Brian,
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 did not realize, I guess, that a university mailing list existed. If a mail falls on an unsubscribed mailing list, did it ever get sent? ;-) I'll have to subscribe.
Also, academics are not the only constituency that are unfamiliar with open source and need some help getting engaged. Maybe there could be some general guidance at a top level off of the wiki and hyperledger.org pages that provide some high-level
guidance and connect with the Community Architecture team, and then link/hand off to the various project's specific guidance.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
Christopher Ferris
IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology
email: chrisfer@...
twitter: @christo4ferris
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
----- 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:
and have signed up 18 different universities across US, Europe and China as free associate members:
Infomal engagement is just as important:
And true to form, we even have a mailing list:
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
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
|
|
Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Christopher Ferris <chrisfer@...>
Brian,
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 did not realize, I guess, that a university mailing list existed. If a mail falls on an unsubscribed mailing list, did it ever get sent? ;-) I'll have to subscribe.
Also, academics are not the only constituency that are unfamiliar with open source and need some help getting engaged. Maybe there could be some general guidance at a top level off of the wiki and hyperledger.org pages that provide some high-level guidance and connect with the Community Architecture team, and then link/hand off to the various project's specific guidance.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
Christopher Ferris IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology email: chrisfer@... twitter: @christo4ferris
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
----- 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:
and have signed up 18 different universities across US, Europe and China as free associate members:
Infomal engagement is just as important:
And true to form, we even have a mailing list:
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
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
|
|
Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Christopher Ferris <chrisfer@...>
Hart, thanks for the note and the suggestion. I am not sure that creating yet another SIG is the answer to improving how we communicate how to contribute to the various projects, though.
The ROE for contributing to Hyperledger Fabric are well documented in the CONTRIBUTING [1] guide in the Fabric documentation, and linked from the Hyperledger project page [5], Wiki [2] and GitHub [3].
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.
We have a bi-weekly Maintainers meeting in the Hyperledger calendar and listed on the Wiki and the CONTRIBUTING guide where we review the roadmap and invite others to come and make proposals for new features/development.
Now, is using Gerrit and JIRA easy peasey? Admittedly, not initially, but the documentation to get someone started are pretty clear and in fact consistent with other major projects that leverage Gerrit (in fact we also link to other sites that had awesome getting started material). Frankly, once you have the git hooks in place, it is a snap. There is also RocketChat and email with plenty of people there to help with any getting started hiccups. There are also the Hyperledger Community Architects, though IMO that role could be a bit more visible and even directly accessible off of the hyperledger.org project pages.
Could the material be improved? Of course, in fact, making suggestions as to HOW it could be improved would be an awesome initial contribution, especially if by someone who struggled. The whole idea behind open source is to have continuous improvement by those interested in the project.
I do know that the Fast Fabric team had connected with the Fabric Maintainers. They presented their findings to the Fabric Maintainers call, and received very positive feedback and encouragement to contribute. What I think we had was a situation of incompatible expectations. We were expecting the Fast Fabric team to pull from their work and make incremental CRs to Fabric through the documented process, where I think that they thought the members of the Fabric community would do that. We also connected via IBM Research, and maybe we could/should have had one or more of the maintainers engaged directly.
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.
Cheers,
Christopher Ferris IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology email: chrisfer@... twitter: @christo4ferris
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
----- 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
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Create a new project proposal
Hi Everyone, I want to propose a new project in the community. This new project will be called Justitia.I hope to communicate with you here and receive some good suggestions.
Justitia helps consortium members generate and maintain all of their certificates, easily deploy and maintain their own nodes. On the other hand, it helps users manage the configuration of consortium and channels, including configurations such as members and policies.
To find out more about justitia, check out the project proposal( https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/HYP/Hyperledger+Justitia+Proposal).
Thanks
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tsc@lists.hyperledger.org Calendar <tsc@...>
Reminder: Hyperledger Fabric Quarterly Update Due #tsc-project-update
When:
Thursday, 4 July 2019
View Event
Organizer:
community-architects@...
Description: The Hyperledger Fabric update to the TSC was due 1 July, 2019, and it will be presented to the TSC on 4 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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Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Virgil Griffith <virgil@...>
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.
-Virgil
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
Terrific write-up, thank you Hart!
We have long believed we need to engage
academia, and have a formal process for doing so:
and have signed up 18 different
universities across US, Europe and China as free associate
members:
Infomal engagement is just as important:
And true to form, we even have a
mailing list:
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
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
|
|
Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
Terrific write-up, thank you Hart!
We have long believed we need to engage
academia, and have a formal process for doing so:
and have signed up 18 different
universities across US, Europe and China as free associate
members:
Infomal engagement is just as important:
And true to form, we even have a
mailing list:
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
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
|
|
Re: Academic Involvement in Hyperledger

Baohua Yang
I like this idea, it is really important to bridge industry and academia together, and create great open-source projects.
And it would be appealing, what kind of hurdles they met when made the contributions?
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
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
|
|
Academic Involvement in Hyperledger
hmontgomery@us.fujitsu.com <hmontgomery@...>
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
|
|
Identity WG call- notes of the meeting June 26, 2019
Hello all, Questions/comments/corrections welcome. We have a tentative agenda for the next call scheduled for the 10th of July also linked to from the notes. The attendees should provide more details or corrections against their names if they desire. Links to audio/video are also available in the notes. Best, Vipin
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Re: [Hyperledger Labs] Proposal: Require two factor auth for Hyperledger Labs on github in a week

Ry Jones
Sure. I created a group of non-2fa users in labs and sent a message to the group. Many of them are people that have not used labs or even github at all this year.
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 11:36 AM Mark Wagner < mwagner@...> wrote: With the July 4th holiday and my assumption of minimal support on the 4th and 5th, would it make sense to delay a week ?
-mark
On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 7:30 AM Ry Jones < rjones@...> wrote: 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
--
Mark Wagner
Senior Principal Software Engineer Performance and Scalability Red Hat, Inc
-- Ry Jones Community Architect, Hyperledger
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Re: [Hyperledger Labs] Proposal: Require two factor auth for Hyperledger Labs on github in a week
mark wagner <mwagner@...>
With the July 4th holiday and my assumption of minimal support on the 4th and 5th, would it make sense to delay a week ?
-mark
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 7:30 AM Ry Jones < rjones@...> wrote: 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
-- Mark Wagner
Senior Principal Software Engineer Performance and Scalability Red Hat, Inc
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Re: Proposal: Require two factor auth for Hyperledger Labs on github in a week

Ry Jones
I've asked in chat, and I'm asking on the mailing list. I haven't run an activity audit on the labs repos (yet).
My next proposal to labs is to archive some of the labs that seem to have run the course. We have a distinct org for that: Ry
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 7:40 AM Christopher B Ferris < chrisfer@...> wrote: Have we reached out to get people to add 2FA? You can @ the repo members. Cheers, Christopher Ferris IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology IBM Digital Business Group, Open Technologies email: chrisfer@...twitter: @christo4ferris On Jun 27, 2019, at 7:29 AM, Ry Jones < rjones@...> wrote: 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
-- Ry Jones Community Architect, Hyperledger
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Re: Proposal: Require two factor auth for Hyperledger Labs on github in a week
Christopher Ferris <chrisfer@...>
Have we reached out to get people to add 2FA? You can @ the repo members. Cheers, Christopher Ferris IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology IBM Digital Business Group, Open Technologies email: chrisfer@...twitter: @christo4ferris
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
On Jun 27, 2019, at 7:29 AM, Ry Jones < rjones@...> wrote: 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
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GitHub package registry beta

Ry Jones
GitHub has a beta for a package registry. We're opted into the waiting list; you can read more here: I'm interested in what you think about publishing on github instead of npm or dockerhub directly. I don't have any opinions beyond it would be one less thing to manage. Ry -- Ry Jones Community Architect, Hyperledger
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Proposal: Require two factor auth for Hyperledger Labs on github in a week

Ry Jones
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
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