Project

Hyperledger Aries

Project Health

Project health is strong, getting stronger, and the community is thriving. There are a number of significant projects going on within and outside of Hyperledger related to Aries, and continuous progress is being made across the community.

Questions/Issues for the TSC

Given the nature of Hyperledger Aries as a set of protocols and a set of implementations of those protocols versus a releasable artifact, how do we declare Aries as "active" vs. the current "incubation"? A newcomer arriving at Hyperledger knowing about Indy and Aries might see the "incubation" status and shy away, even though Aries builds on Indy and it has numerous production deployments?  IMHO, Aries is production ready, but there has been little discussion about changing the status, and it's not clear how the Hyperledger definition should apply to this type of project.

A second question relates to the fact that a core element of Aries is the protocols defined in the Aries RFCs repo. Does the TSC have an opinion on whether Hyperledger Aries is the right, safe location for those protocols?

Releases

Required: Regular software product releases are a sign of a healthy project. Reports should list the releases made since your last report, along with the release date of each. NOTE: If no releases were made, list the date of the most recent prior release.

There are three major Frameworks in Aries – Aries Cloud Agent Python (ACA-Py), Aries Framework Go (AFGo) and Aries Framework .NET (AFD), with a fourth (aries-framework-vcx) being extracted from Indy into Aries.  All are active, with ACA-Py and AFGo releasing regularly:

There are (at least) 14 active repos in Aries (per the metrics below – although I think there might be a couple of others...to be verified), including the major (and several less mature) frameworks, conformance and interoperability test suites, and several tools and utilities.  Added in early 2021 is an Aries-level secure storage component that replaces a comparable component in the indy-sdk and is available for use across frameworks. It is the first "shared component" in Aries, with more expected in the next year.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Per the Aries Activity Dashboard for the last quarter of 2020, Aries codebases had 708 commits in 506 PRs from 44 contributors.

Community participation is extremely active in rocketchat channels, community calls, and repo PR reviews and issues. Email lists are less frequently used.

Coordination with the DIF DIDComm working group is healthy, with regular reports being shared.

Project work in main repos is healthy and active.

Current Plans

Maintainer Diversity

Aries is a multi-codebase effort, and each codebase has its own set of maintainers. The diversity of maintainers closely matches contributors, with notes below.  Cross framework collaboration is increasing. For example, work is happening on interop testing capabilities across the Python, Go, .NET and JavaScript frameworks.

As interest in verifiable credentials has increased with COVID-19 use cases (proof of testing, proof of immunization and mobile medical workforces), interest and attendance has increased, as have deployments of Aries-based implementations.

Contributor Diversity

We have not tracked meeting attendance, RFC contributions, and code contributions in a way that makes it easy to quantify contributor diversity. Here are a few indicators of our current diversity:

Additional Information

Please note the questions to the TSC raised at the top of the document.

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