3 years ago

Category: Kubernetes

According to the blog post, the new steering committee will consist of 13 seats, with four “elected Community Seats” and nine “proportionally allocated Contribution Seats,” a change they say “solidifies our commitment to open governance, ensuring that the community around the project will always be able to steer its direction, and that no one company has majority voting control over the project.”

To this end, they write, they have “implemented a cap on the number of seats a company can hold, such that they can neither unanimously win a vote, or veto a decision of the rest of the committee.”

As for how those seats are allocated, the four Community Seats will consist of four representatives from four different organizations and will be chosen in an annual election.

The Istio team compares its approach to Contribution Seats to that of Kubernetes, writing that “in Kubernetes, the mantra was ‘chop wood, carry water,’ and we similarly want to reward companies who are fueling the growth of the project with contributions.”

Another hill I will die on: attributing #OpenSource contributions (e.g., number of PRs merged) to companies (without recognition of the individual), and calculating the number of “seats” that a company “earns” based on that number, is a crappy way to build a community.