Proposal: Infrastructure Task Force

TLDR; want to help maintain CCG's IT infrastructure? leave a comment here: https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/168

Hi all, as our ecosystem matures, we are experiencing increased demand to support a growing number of work items and community activities. For example, we have recently switched to a video conferencing system, saw the introduction of CCG-hosted vocabularies, and most recently fielded the request of standing up a community managed npm repository.

As chairs, Kim, Heather, and I serve in volunteer roles, putting our time and effort into serving the community. With heroic efforts from community members such as Manu Sporny, Amy Guy, Jonathan Holt, Sethi Shivam, and Luiz Aoqui, we have been able to begin stabilizing our video conferencing plus meeting minutes as an upgrade from the SIP-based voice-only teleconf started over ten years ago. However, it is clear that this task has significantly distracted us from some of our stated goals as chairs such as documenting processes, automating other aspects of participation, and facilitating diversity and inclusion.

About two weeks ago, Heather sent out a community survey (https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2020Nov/0076.html), and we are pleased to share that we received strong interest from community members to help support and maintain our community group infrastructure, both in sweat equity and financial contributions (and they say there's no money in open source and open standards ;).

We are extremely grateful for the high level of response, as it will help us maintain self-sufficiency as a group and free us to aggressively pursue our stated purpose in the charter: "to explore the creation, storage, presentation, verification, and user control of credentials." We warmly welcome contributions to a newly proposed task force focused on CCG infrastructure. In the proposal draft below, we outline the core responsibilities for the task force. If you are interested in helping to maintain CCG infrastructure, leave a comment expressing your interest here:

https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/168

Please stay tuned if you are willing to help support the group financially, however modestly. Our main costs are a few servers, storage, and cloud services, such as the dial-in lines for Jitsi. Before we can accept financial contributions, we must first form an above-board process that ensures transparency and propriety with respect to use of funds.

Thanks again for the support everyone! With it, we will achieve record new levels of professionalism, process clarity, support for work items, inclusivity, and growth of the credentials ecosystem.

Best,
- Wayne

Received on Tuesday, 24 November 2020 23:26:14 UTC