OpenJS Foundation

Transcript

>> Thank you very much. Hi, everybody. How are you all doing today? Jump up and down a few things. Stretch a little bit. High-five the person to your right because you can.

My name is Adam Miller. This is OpenJS. This is between you and me, we won't tell the panellists, how many people know what the JS Foundations do, and interact with them a lot and should be up here on this panel? I see a few hands.

Who knows that the foundations exist and kind of know what they do but really ... couldn't give a talk on it or be on the panel here. Here is, "We're talking about foundations? We're talking about open source, right, why is there a foundation involved?" We've done a lot of work recent to merge together the Node Foundation, and the JavaScript Foundation into the OpenJS Foundation. It's been a ten-month process or more.

We are really excited to share with you what we've been doing. There's an awesome panel of people here who are have been rocking it on the foundation formation side, and I guess we will about down the line and do intros here.

>> You have a standalone full-screen experience from looks like any other app on the iPhone. So it's basically a PWA. Then you have - feature phones, I have this Nokia here with me, feature phones, non-touch, they're supporting PWAs. But it's not just on mobile. On desktop you can go and install Trivago, Tinder, by the way, and you have a - that works on Windows, Chromebook, Mac and Linux.

You can open more PWAs at the same time. We have the properly, we just need to create really, really good experiences, and today, let's say that I can say that maybe half of the PWA s out there on R offering a good experience. The other half are away for offering a competition like the native apps, and so we will try to see why, and what we can do today to improve that experience.

So, talking about the app cycle, okay? So because we are creating apps, not just websites that will appear in the browser. So, when you open a PWA, so if the d Platform. I'm Google's representative as a platinum member board representative and the vice-chair of the Open JS Foundation. Before that, I was the elected representative on the board prior to the merger in the original structure of the node.js Foundation.

There were three board seats that are community members. Tracy had one of them, and I was representing the other group.

>> I'm Adam Miller. In the daytime, I work on LinkedIn. We can't talk to the future of the organisation without looking to the past. I would like to get a tl;dr on the node Node Foundation and the JavaScript Foundation.

>> So a the although of people may not realise that the JavaScript community has had a foundation working on behalf of open-source projects for a long time. Back in the mid-2000s, we had the jQuery project that got wildly popular and we made a foundation for jQuery that added projects over time which later merged with what was the Dojo Foundation which had a handful of projects itself and just kind of that was about three or four years ago, and so that was when we became the JS Foundation, and we've been rocking along behind the scenes for quite some time.

>> And the Node JS Foundation was formed in 2015 to provide a future place where a number of different groups within the node community could come together and work on figuring out how to move things forward into the future. There was a few sort of key things that were important, which I think we will see flow through so what we see in the OpenJS Foundation as well as that neutrality, if they contribute, they have the tools and the access that they need to make things happen. That is something we will see reflected in what we talk about in the OpenJS Foundation as well. In September 15, we - we've seen consistent and reliable releases ever since then. I think it's a good sign of the stability and the ability for everybody to get in in work together on that front.

>> Yes, I know early on when it was just in early discussions about the two foundations merging, there was a good bit of uncertainty about whether it should happen, whether it was the right time to do it. I know a lot of you feel that a lot of those concerns early on, I was hoping you could answer maybe why not, and why merge?

>> Can you repeat that one more time really quickly?

>> Why are we merging now and why - what is the reason for the merge?

>> It's been a long couple of days! So there are a number of different reasons to consider merging foundations. If you go and look at the bylaws of the foundation itself, right in there, we claim that we want to be a centre of gravity for the JavaScript ecosystem. Prior to there being one primary foundation, it wasn't really clear. And it's hard because Node was the main project in the node.js Foundation, and joining something bigger means giving some stuff up, and there's an anecdote I really like. When I kind of started getting into the node.js ecosystem, when I had just moved to California, I got - I got a free ticket to go to a conference called Node Summit.

This was right around the time of the fork, and they were talking about merging, and I have no shame, so I walked right up to Scott Hammond at the time the CEO of Joyant and asked him why would you put Node? A foundation - in a foundation? He said it's better to have a smaller piece of a bigger pie. To me, when I think about these foundations, and we just had our summit recently which was fantastic, and so many new faces in the room that weren't there before, we just massively expanded the scope of the work that we can do, who we can work with, how we can work with them. We get to revisit all of these kind of preconceived notions when Node first went in the foundation, it was very reactive. We had things that we needed to protect and fix and now we can be proactive and start thinking about what we want to build.

>> It made me think we all know we can accomplish a lot more than we could on our own as an individual, so it's the same thing for a larger foundation.

>> And sort of wearing the Node hat, there was a lot of scepticism when we were talking about a merger. And not - I wouldn't necessarily say it was balanced. There was a lot from the Node side, and, again, it was because we had experience going through I think a pretty tumultuous foundation formation not too many years ago, and Node was finally feeling like a stable place sort of firing on all cylinders, we were working together in the community, and the TSC, but I think as part of that, we ended up seeing how bringing in the up stream components in the JS ecosystem, that, like, we were stronger when we were doing that together, and so by focusing on these sorts of things that we had already learned, transparency, including not - not just including - giving autonomy to the project members so they could run and host these meetings, we ran weekly meetings when it came to the merger discussion and planning so whatever wanted to drive the planning from particular initiative phases of making this merger happen, it was only going to happen if people showed up and did the work, and that is from the project side, not from the board side.

>> Yes, I will add that on the .just Foundation side, we immediately you a the benefit of possibly merging with the Node ecosystem because all of our projects really rely on Node. At the same time, there was fear and uncertainty because there was a lot of historical drama, and energy from the community which may be disruptive to what was otherwise fairly stability projects. So, you know, with that optimism, but cautious optimism in mind, everybody got really excited about the possibility of collaborating more closely with their peers on the Node side through one umbrella, and I think that's kind of what put us over the edge.

>> And one of the things that building on what both Tracy and Jory was saying, from the get-go, we approached this from an egalitarian mind set. We made the doors open, like we tried to be hyper inclusive as much as possible. If you are a member or a committer, and even then we weren't that picky, like, if you wanted to show up to those meetings and you wasn't being disruptive, you had a voice and a seat at the table, and were participating. I think that was really important to make sure that this could be successful.

>> I was going to say, we looked at the governance for a number of the different projects, for the Node Foundation, Kubernetes, and I'm happy that we ended up with something that is the most, has the most opportunity, and hopefully the best place where people will want to come and will attract a lot of good people through that. I'm happy by looking at that, we ended up with that open and really nice governance.

>> I think in all of this drives home the value of this work is always project-driven, and that's the point of the foundation, is to help empower and give autonomy to the projects, and get sort of the crap out of the way for them to be able to do their good work.

>> I think what I've heard on that front is we talk about great projects and the focus will be on those great projects, not the foundation itself.

>> So let's dig into some of that nitty-gritty. Almost everybody in the room here is an engineer, and I have always held the opinion that governance is just coding but with words! It's really what it has felt like over the past ten months, and we have a visual aid here as we talk about it. Let's dive into some of the more nitty-gritty details here of under the hood of what is kind of making this foundation, new foundation tick, and we can talk about some of the back story, and reasoning behind these sections of the foundation. Yes, so, I mean, let's take it from the top and go OpenJS board and talk about their functionality.

>> To start out with, I talked about the governance. We have multiple levels so there are observers. Any who wants to can come up and participate in the meetings. We want to get as many different ideas to come to the best answers. We have regular members who can actually, people who in my mind who said I'm making a commitment to be involved regularly and they can they can be recognised for that.

Again, both observers and regular members are involved in all of the work that goes on. And then finally, we have voting members where in the rare cases where we need to actually have a vote on something, it's that subset who will do that vote. Now, our experience in the Node project at least has been that votes are very rare, we follow a consensus-seeking approach, and really it's going to be all of those members who have ownership and who push things forward, and so it should not really matter which level you're in, but we have just to have the different levels for the contingencies.

>> One thing that I can add, a mantra I would tell myself, was that we wanted to create structures and hierarchies of responsibility rather than power. So there isn't fundamentally a major power balance between any of the members of the any of the projects, being a voting member just means you're more responsible. You need to be showing up. You need to make sure that things are getting finished but you just don't get to shut down another person's voice because you have that responsibility.

>> The governance is really written so that all the responsibilities of the CPC are the responsibilities of all the members as opposed to anybody in particular.

>> I want to talk a little bit about the projects if we can, the staging, because I think for me, this was a big bringing all JS Foundation projects on board, and important they had a voice in the project, and where they were going to derive value and get value and services from the organisation, so we came up with this proposal that was loosely based on the CNCF model of impact projects, growth-stage projects, and what is not pictured here is there a project which we have six projects that we deemed, and the projects themselves opted into this stage, functionally complete. We recognised and thanked them for their contribution they made to the comment but we're not really encouraging people to go and contribute to those projects or adopt those projects now. We have five impact projects which are sort of the projects that are a real kind of need to have some resources and support on a very active basis from the foundation. They're used heavily in enterprise, and they need that backing. We have six growth projects and that stage is for projects that have a specific objective in mind, like there is a goal.

I need, I want to grow my contributor base. I want to increase the number of implementations. I want to put on an Yvette, or something like that. They have some specific goal for which they need extra resources from the foundation for a short period of time, growth stages for those projects, and then we have 15 projects that are projects that are fine, they're kind of doing their thing, their resource needs are pretty set, and we don't have to do too much to support that.

>> One thing I can add from the At Large is the Node Foundation, that was the only project. That was half true. It had attempted an incubation programme to bring for projects in. I personally, and I can't speak for how other people feel, I don't feel that programme was successful.

While we were merging, we have to make sure that all projects are accounted for, and both ... and Express primarily wanted to continue operating the way that they were, to be able to not to have anything day-to-day change, and perhaps have a bit of a better idea of what resources were available to them such as CI, or legal counsel, or PR and marketing in case they needed it, but they mostly didn't want anything to change. By coming in as an At Large projects, these two projects mostly on rails doing their own thing, as far as I know, and I'm saying this because we haven't heard anything from them, it seems like everything's going fine, and there's been pretty much no change day-to-day, and so to me, I see a lot of these projects as you do your thing the way you want to do your thing, and we are here to support you when you need it, and one of the really big things I think we will want to be doing in the near future is codefying and making it far clearer what resources are available, how to get access to those resources, and how to create programmes for new resources if they're not available yet.

>> I think we're better set up now to deal with and cope with the different requirements or aspirations that each project will have as opposed to being part of the node.js Foundation where you're a small part of a bigger project.

>> Do you want to talk about the membership structure and how representation works at the layer above the CPC?

>> Sorry, can you repeat that?

>> Do - I would love to hear more about the membership structure and how the CPC interacts with the rest of the org a little bit.

>> I think, Adam, let me know, you're asking about how is the CPC formed and what is the structure of the foundation on the community side?

>> Yes.

>> I will start. One thing that is really important, and this is the only thing I really wanted to say, is that the board which we are seeing over on the left-hand side, which is made up of a number of different members from corporate entities, as well as as well as three three community members right now, it is three, it will go down to two soon, there is governance - grab me, I will explain - but that group is responsible for the things that you see listed there. They do not have authority over anything else. The rest of the day-to-day operations of the foundation that you see under the Cross Project Council As well as the technical governance of project is completely air gapped.

The boards and projects can work together on things. It doesn't mean that we are not partners. But what it does mean is that the foundation cannot install people into a project.

>> I think a good example here I can provide is what happens if a code of conduct violation happens with someone on leadership in one of the projects? What one would hope is that a project would be able to manage that conflict themselves and resolve it. It's really hard to have to enforce those policies on someone that you've worked with for years, that you've seen work really hard, but that you're seeing disagreements on. So, you know, by experience, we've seen this sort of happen that you could end up having it saying like, board, we need you to provide an answer because we don't really know what to do here, and we know you have experience at it. The board, instead of saying, okay, you're going to do this thing, it's instead saying we are going to help you provide resources, and we're going to work with you together to figure this out, but ultimately, you're responsible for this work. We just want to be here to guide you and provide the monetary resources, the legal resources, to help resolve that together, and hopefully we will be better for that in the long run.

>> Taking on from the board participation, we then have voting members which are elected. We have two from the impact project. It's up to the project to decide how they want to elect those representatives. We also have two which represent all of the non-impact projects, although this year, as a bootstrap, we accepted everybody who wanted to participate at that level into the CPC which is really great because we want to kick off with as many people as we can in helping to move things forward.

Then we actually can have an additional two voting members who are elected from the regular members. If we see some people who haven't been elected by an individual project but are doing a lot of work and helping to move the CPC work forward, they can be elected as voting members Intel.

>> Thank you. Coming up on time here. So I just want to go rapid-fire. Starting with Myles. If people leave here with one takeaway, from this panel, what would you like it to be?

>> You don't have to do this alone.

>> Oh. Succinct. I like it! Applause for that! [Applause].

>> So I think I'm really excited to see how we are going to - again, as Myles said, there's excitement from the summit this week, prior to JSConf EU, excited to seeing these guys saying we are excited, we didn't know there is a possibility here. Taking the work we've done in Node and talk to other people in the groups in the ecosystem, or in the foundation, to get to work together on these things, it's exciting to see the opportunity that we have now in JavaScript to be able to work together on this stuff, even from helping more on the standards side.

>> For me, it's all about new opportunities, and that I see a lot more new opportunities for us to collaborate together, to have a greater impact across projects, and to achieve bigger things. We have an opportunity to achieve things we wouldn't be able to achieve on our own, it's about new opportunities across all of the different aspects.

>> I have, like, 37 things I would like to share with people, but bearing in mind, that we have a minute and a half left, I think the first thing that I would like for you all to take away is that there is a lot of opportunity for you to give impact and what services the Open JS Foundation provides to your projects, and you can follow our work on the Open JS Foundation organisation, bootstrap, called the Cross Project Council repo now. If you have an idea for something that would be helpful to you as a member of one of our projects, or as a potential member of one of our projects, write a proposal or open an issue on that, and start following along with our meetings and that sort of thing on YouTube and our weekly meetings there. We have a great new email list you can start to receiving these weekly emails from us that sort of summarises like what is going on, we have JS Foundation Slack Channel, so there is a lot of opportunities to start having these conversations together, and you can make a difference. You can come, and I can't wait to see you there.

>> Wonderful, I just want to say I saw a lot of this collaboration between projects starting at the most recent collaborators summit which was right before this conference. We got people from across the new open JS Foundation together. It was historically a Node event but the conversations that actually happened in the hallway and in talks are things that I could only dream about. We build amazing things on the internet together, we build amazing things with JavaScript together, and like Myles put it, we don't have to do it alone, and we do it better together. So, definitely go and get involved.

We are up on GitHub. You can go to the website. Thank you all for coming to this panel. [Applause].