Overview

Maintainers Summits are being designed to replace the current Hackfest concept. Instead of being open to the public, Maintainers Summits are invitation only events that are designed for existing project maintainers, TSC members, and working group chairs; however, may be open to other contributors based on a nomination process. Maintainers Summits will be limited to no more than 50 people to ensure that progress can be made on shared Hyperledger technical goals. If you are looking for events that are open to the public, please check out the Bootcamps section of the Wiki.

Goal

The goal for a maintainers summit is to encourage cross collaboration amongst the different projects that are part of Hyperledger. This cross collaboration can come in the form of education about each of the projects, specific work surrounding an architectural component of the frameworks (e.g., common consensus mechanisms), contribution or review of cross-project whitepapers developed by the different working groups, or other items that the maintainers feel is important to ensuring that we are one community.

Timing

Maintainers Summits will last for three (3) days and be held twice a year.

Program Committee

The program committee will be responsible for determining who receives an invite to the Maintainer Summit and for developing the program agenda. The program committee will be made up of five people, one of which will be a Hyperledger Community Architect. The other four members of the committee will be members of the TSC since the TSC is responsible for the technical direction of Hyperledger. These four members can be different people for each summit or they can be the same for the term of the TSC.

Determining Who is Invited

A short list of contributors will be created that includes:

• TSC members
• Working group chairs and vice chairs
• Active Core Contributors - defined as contributors who have contributed 80% of the code and have made a contribution in the last 6 months (as of January 15th, using the project reports tool, this list included 54 people)

In addition to the above, anyone that suggests a topic is added to the short list of names.

The program committee will use this list to determine who should receive an invite.

Agenda Creation

The summit's agenda will be created by the program committee, but will require input from the technical community regarding the items that need to be discussed. The goal of the maintainers summit should be top of mind when deciding what topics are added to the agenda. The topics should focus on:

• items that enhance cross collaboration amongst projects
• items that are easier to resolve in person than over email
• "information sharing" topics if they are clearly of interest to the wider development community (i.e., advanced training in topics that would be useful to all projects)

Topics will be suggested by the technical community. The TSC mailing list will be used for topic suggestions. The email should be prefixed with [summit-topic]. The email should contain the following information:

• Topic Title
• Topic Description
• Why This Topic is Important
• Projects Impacted
• Suggested Time Required to Cover and Discuss

The first two days of the agenda will be from the proposed [summit-topic] emails. The last day will be reserved for an unconfernece style agenda to handle topics that come up during the actual summit.

Open Questions

• Bootcamps work for entry point into the community. Maintainers Summits are for core developers to work on shared technical goals. Do we need another type of event for those in the middle? 
• How do we break up the 50 people between the different projects, TSC members, and working group chairs? Today we have 11 TSC members, 12 projects, and 5 WGs. Assuming no overlap and one person per project and WG, that is already 28 people.
• Will the sessions be recorded for public consumption?
• Should we have a program committee for deciding both who should get an invite, as well as, what topics will be on the agenda?
• How will a short list of names be determined for consideration of receiving an invite?
• How much time should be set aside for a Maintainers Summit?
• How often will Maintainers Summits occur?