[asterisk-dev] Working Groups

[Matthew Jordan]

A couple of specific comments on Dan's points below, followed by some
general thoughts.


On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 4:25 AM, Dan Jenkins <dan.jenkins88 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> So +1 to working groups (oh it was me that suggested it - can I +1 my own
> idea?)
>
> I suggested it because of the lack of ways of being able to ask for feature
> requests through Jira. The idea was 1) to get the community more a part of
> what drives Asterisk forward (and not just those that can turn up to devcon)
> but 2) to be able to formulate a plan on things we want in certain areas
> going forward. For the Node.js project there are many working groups for
> different purposes (https://nodejs.org/en/about/working-groups/) - I'm part
> of the documentation working group for Node.js. Because Node.js is covered
> under the Node.js foundation (and then the linux foundation) people within
> these working groups directly influence X.
>
> So the documentation working group tries to make clear documentation etc
> etc; theres an Internationalisation working group who purely put their
> skills in multiple languages into action by translating blog
> posts/website/documentation etc into other languages used throughout the
> world.
>
> Its a little different here because Digium are pretty much in tight control
> of a lot of stuff.
>
> But we can still affect change within the community. So three areas close to
> my heart are migrating away from chan_sip (purely from a removing old code,
> we don't need two SIP stacks point of view), ARI and future features for
> that - at the moment we have a wiki page for feature requests but doesn't
> encourage talking publicly about these things and the third is documentation
> - we all know the wiki isn't brilliant. if you know where you're going then
> yes, the wiki is amazing. I have a new dev working at Nimble Ape who started
> looking at ARI the week I was away at Devcon. I got back and was talking to
> him and he said it was hard to find good docs etc - he had found the
> examples on the wiki but when I sent him the REST docs and the Events docs
> that are within the wiki he proclaimed "this is exactly what I needed last
> week" - the docs are there but hard to find etc. a documentation working
> group would try to tackle this.
>
> So yes, I'm up for working groups, each should be led by one person and then
> a team built up under them. Ideally I'd like to discussion to be easy and in
> a public place - this would mean (in my opinion) either making a new github
> org or utilising the asterisk github org, making public repos for each
> working group and having maintainers of them (for example the testing
> node.js working group is here - https://github.com/nodejs/testing) - I'd
> rather it be encompassed by the asterisk org but don't know how that would
> sit with Digium etc.

I'd prefer to avoid using Github for more work. With our focus usually
on JIRA and Gerrit, I think we have a tendency to forget that it's
there, and miss looking at things that occur in the existing ancillary
projects. It'd be nice if we could use the existing community/project
infrastructure for the working groups - Gerrit/JIRA/Discourse/etc.

If the goal of a working group is to make recommendations on
priorities for the project, then having a mechanism to allow the
working group (and potentially the broader community) provide input
and/or vote on said priorities seems like it would be useful. That
makes me lean towards JIRA, but I'm open to other suggestions.

> Three potential working groups:
>
> PJSIP migration
> Documentation
> ARI
>

I'd probably change "PJSIP Migration" to just "PJSIP" or even "SIP",
but other than that, I think all three of those are good ideas for
working groups.

Some more general thoughts:

- If the goal of a working group is to provide recommendations on
project goals, than working groups really need to have someone
involved who is also interested in implementing the features of the
working group. I think if a working group has some interest in the
user community but no active developers, then the recommendations of
the working group are going to simply languish, causing frustration
for the working group members. As such, I think in order for a working
group to be "active", there should be at least one person on the
working group who is an Asterisk developer. That doesn't have to be
someone at Digium, but it should be someone who is willing to
contribute patches for the working group's recommendations from time
to time.

- People participating in the working groups definitely need to
understand that there is *no* guarantee that their recommendations
will be enacted. The output of a working group should be
recommendations that any developer in the community can use as a
guide. That isn't to say that I think the output of working groups
would be ignored - far from it, as I think everyone would benefit from
this process - but the more ambitious the recommendation, the more
difficult it is to build consensus and resources to accomplish the
goal. Having expectations be set would be good to avoid
disappointment.

Matt

-- 
Matthew Jordan
Digium, Inc. | CTO
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org