1. posterid:949235
  2. on expanding the TSC

Re: on expanding the TSC

Hart Montgomery
 

Hi Everyone,

 

Chris, thanks for bringing this up.  This makes a lot of sense for us as a community.  We are a far bigger organization than when we started, and it only makes sense to increase representation so that we cover more diverse groups, areas of expertise, and so forth.

 

A question for everyone:  if we are going to do this, is it too much to ask that we make a change in time for this election?  It seems that we wouldn’t have to change the way the election is run, other than reporting the first k names (for some 11 < k <= 21, probably) rather than just the first 11 names, so we would only have to get approval from the governing board by the end of the election rather than the beginning.

 

It seems to me like we have a pretty strong consensus on this, so it might be possible to move fast from the perspective of the TSC.  I worry that waiting will cause us to spend a lot of time handling a second election/appointment process, and also that if we have a second process, it will create “first” and “second” class TSC members, which is something that would be nice to avoid if we can.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?  Is what I am suggesting logistically impossible (it very well might be).

 

Thanks for your time if you’ve made it this far.

 

Thanks,

Hart

 

 

From: tsc@... [mailto:tsc@...] On Behalf Of Arnaud Le Hors
Sent: Thursday, August 8, 2019 4:18 PM
To: Christopher Ferris <chrisfer@...>
Cc: tsc@...
Subject: Re: [Hyperledger TSC] on expanding the TSC

 

I support this idea. My only concern with growing the TSC would be the risk of not reaching quorum but if we mitigate this risk with an appropriate measure I think we can only gain from the expansion.
For what it's worth, OASIS has to that end a notion of Voting Rights that you lose after missing 2 meetings and gain back after attending 2 meetings that is easy to implement and works well in my experience:
https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/tc-process-2017-05-26#gainVotingRights
--
Arnaud  Le Hors - Senior Technical Staff Member, Blockchain & Web Open Technologies - IBM




From:        "Christopher Ferris" <chrisfer@...>
To:        tsc@...
Date:        08/08/2019 02:53 PM
Subject:        [EXTERNAL] [Hyperledger TSC] on expanding the TSC
Sent by:        tsc@...




On today’s TSC call, I noted that when we established Hyperledger, we had 11 Premier members and chose the number of TSC members as a derivative of that. We now have 18 Premier members and a board that has 21 members. We have grown from one to now twelve projects and we have 3 proposed projects in the pipeline. We also have a growing number of WGs that may also be underrepresented. Yet, we have not grown the TSC beyond the original 11. This means that the TSC may not adequately represent the full breadth of our community.

We talked about the prospect of expanding the TSC to enable greater diversity of projects and WGs, as well as of expertise, etc.

Brian noted that CNCF TOB has an elected tier and a provision in their charter that the elected members may also choose a number of individuals from within the community  to serve as well. This might be a good model to emulate.

Any change in the number of TSC members will, of necessity, require a Hyperledger charter revision requiring a 2/3 vote of the board.

I’d like this email to serve as a continuation of today’s discussion hopefully leading to a formal proposal to a charter revision.

I’ll start by suggesting that we find a way of growing the TSC beginning this year, but after the scheduled TSC election, by at least six members. As was also expressed by Mic, we probably also should keep the size manageable, so maybe no more than 21 total.

Ry and Arnaud also suggested maybe adopting a quorum rule that penalized absentee members by removing them from quorum calculation and suspending voting privs following repeated unexcused absences as a device to encourage participation and diminish potential that we not achieve quorum (this seems not to have been a problem excepting in the summer months, but we might consider something as a prophylactic measure.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Christopher Ferris
IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology
IBM Digital Business Group, Open Technologies
email: chrisfer@...
twitter: @christo4ferris
blog: https://developer.ibm.com/code/author/chrisfer/
IBM Open Source white paper: https://developer.ibm.com/articles/cl-open-architecture-update/
phone: +1 508 667 0402
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