The Chef Board of Governance (CBGB) held its second meeting of 2016 on Wednesday, September 7. Eight members of the board attended the meeting. Nathen Harvey and Thom May from Chef Software were also there to observe and advise.
| Project Lead | Users / Contributors | Corporate Contributors | Lieutenants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adam Jacob | Ranjib Dey | Facebook – Phil Dibowitz | Joshua Timberman |
| Doug Ireton | PagerDuty – Evan Gilman | ||
| Noah Kantrowitz | Nordstrom – Mark Ayers |
Katherine Daniels, a corporate contributor, Charity Majors, a user / contributor, and Seth Vargo and Jon Cowie, both lieutenants, were unable to attend.
The board reviewed the governance policy and outcomes from the last meeting. It was decided that the CBGB should meet twice per calendar year instead of quarterly.
The mission, vision, and values, as outlined in the previous meeting, were reviewed and the board’s commitment to them is strong.
Mission
The Chef community exists to create a welcoming, transformative, and transparent environment that enriches the daily life of Chef users.
Vision
Chef community members feel safe, supported, and effective participating in and contributing to the Chef ecosystem.
Values
The state of the Chef Community was discussed. Specifically, the board was interested in assessing the current state of health of the community. Noah shared that about 90% of recent contributions to the project have come from Chef employees with Facebook employees making up a significant portion of the remaining contributions. The board decided to gather some metrics about the usage of the new Chef Community Slack team. The board has also recommended a survey be sent to all Chef Community members to help gather data and insights as to its health and improvement the community could consider.
The board raised some concerns about the official Chef documentation. Concerns included that the docs are incomplete, inaccurate (in some cases), and the that documentation team does not have enough capacity to keep up with the pace of development. Additionally, new releases sometimes result in deprecated or older features being removed from the documentation even though there may still be many people using those features.
The CBGB will ask maintainers to encourage updates to DOC_CHANGES.md along with pull requests and other code updates.
The CBGB recommends that we work to stabilize the documentation by not removing deprecated features too quickly.
An exploration of ways to make it easier to contribute to documentation was recommended. The current process for getting documentation running locally for development purposes is difficult. Contributing to documentation should be very easy. Discussions about documentation and changes to our processes and tooling there would make for great topics at the upcoming Chef Summits.
The RFC Process continues to work well. There was some concern that some proposed RFCs do not receive enough attention from the community. As such, the CBGB will be recommending some changes to the process.
The CBGB recommends we start planning for version 13 of Chef. That planning should include automatic testing plans and paths for the upgrade. The plan should also include listing and freezing all breaking change that are in-scope for Chef 13 at least three months in advance of release date.
The next CBGB meeting will be planned for the end of 2016 or beginning of 2017. Elections for the 2017 board will be held during this timeframe as well. Questions or thoughts for the board may be sent to cbgb@chef.io.