Overview

Maintainers Summits are being designed to replace the current Hackfest concept. Maintainers Summits are intended for an advanced technical contributor audience, including core contributors, TSC members, and working group chairs. Maintainers Summits will be limited to ensure that progress can be made on shared Hyperledger technical goals. These goals will be pre-defined prior to the start of the summit to ensure that the right people are present.

While anyone is welcome to join the Maintainers Summits, they are not be suitable for people with no knowledge of Hyperledger and its projects. Also, the expectation for Maintainers Summits should be that the conversation will be deep technical conversations. If you are looking for events that are designed for new contributors, 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 deep technical dives 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.

Who Should Attend

People with a deep understanding of the technical aspects of the Hyperledger projects should attend the Maintainers Summits. This would include

• 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. 

Agenda Creation

It is extremely important that the Agenda be created prior to the summit. This will ensure that the correct people attend. 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 unconference style agenda to handle topics that come up during the actual summit.