Good Governance Practices for CNCF Projects

The presentation discusses the importance of governance in open source projects and provides guidance on how to establish clear expectations, define project scope and values, and define roles and responsibilities for contributors.

• Governance is about alignment and collaboration within a community.
• Setting clear expectations helps facilitate alignment.
• Defining project scope and values is important to avoid misunderstandings.
• Defining roles and responsibilities for contributors is crucial for effective governance.
• The CNCF provides resources and guidance for projects to establish governance, but it is up to individual projects to build their own communities and adopters.
• The CNCF prefers the use of Apache2 for code and Creative Commons for documentation, but exceptions can be made with approval from the governing board.

The speaker mentions that different business units within VMware have varying levels of involvement in open source projects. To justify the importance of open source work to executives, it is helpful to tie it back to something strategically important for the company. For example, VMware can easily make a case for involvement in CNCF projects like Kubernetes because they are building entire product lines on top of these technologies.

Too many maintainers think they don’t need governance ... until something goes wrong. Undefined or inadequate governance results in a lack of transparency that causes confusion over how decisions are made, unrealistic expectations, and unresolved disagreements. The CNCF helps projects adopt good governance practices with a focus on fair and transparent governance from sandbox to incubating to graduated. This talk will cover * Why governance is important * Selecting an appropriate governance model * Templates with patterns that work well to bootstrap CNCF projects * The role of mission, values, and scope in setting expectations * Defining roles, responsibilities, processes, and procedures within your governance model * Contributor ladders to help people move into leadership positions * The governance pros and cons of contributing a project to the CNCF The audience will get practical advice about creating fair and neutral governance structures and processes for open source projects.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!