Maintainer's Circle - Values and Principles Development

Speaker: Sarah Novotny

Link to slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P4slcURdbKlIv7TtVfTtIntLMddx95Da/view

Notes (Pt. 1)

  • Look for people most active in your community – they will help draw out values
  • "Culture eats governance for breakfast."
  • Develop Values
    • Principles - give you tools to make decisions
    • Values - aspriational, engaging, interesting, can be virtue signal
  • You are only ever buidling tools to help the community become better
  • Identify the behaviors you want to encourage
    • You should be building from the ground up (based on the exisiting community's behavior)
    • Reward behavior you like
    • What are you currently doing in the community?
    • How are you currently making decisions?
    • Make space for creativity
  • Seek new perspectives
    • Bring in adjacent communities
    • Bring in people who haven't been working on the values already
  • Document decision-making
    • peer accountability system
  • Kubernetes Values
    • Community > Company
    • Distribution > Centralizations
    • Improvement > Stagnation
    • Automation> Process
    • These values help optimize decision making
    • Consider changing your values when they're no longer serving your community
  • Empathize
    • Consider the values that are on the shortlist – they are still important and valuable to think about

Breakout Sessions

Think of a decision in your community that took a lot of effort to wrap up.
Looking at the whole story arc –
What do you wish you’d known at the beginning?
Did the path to this decision reveal anything about the community?
Is there a principle or value which fits the community which if explicit could have made the decision easier.

For the wrap-up please be ready to share the last line of the story of that decision in this form –
But it turns out that __________________________

Breakout room #1
We talked about the decision to move from 4 Kubernetes releases to 3.

But it turns out that no one wants to get out at off hours, particularly between midnight and 5am.

Breakout room #2
KEPs - long time to get folks to come onboard; wish there was more critical user journeys to help them find their tldr; maybe have a process over personalities principles? felt like a chicken and an egg problem. Want transparency, but hard to write things down clearly for different audiences.
but it turns out that…oss community showing up and doing the work wins even if you dont do it in the most 'correct' way (ie: people may bias against writing a KEP and it was/is ok?)

spent a lot of time getting flux and argo to join
but it turns out the community didn't care that much about unforking, not coming together wasn't a disaster it was actually fine
nothing is ever set it stone

Select a repo