[cip-dev] CIP Endeavour decision

[paul.sherwood@codethink.co.uk (Paul Sherwood)]

Matthias,

I only came across your email from June [1] today, which is sad, 
because if I had seen it earlier I would have encouraged others to reply 
to your reasonable questions.

I'm quoting your original text below, and hopefully this will kick the 
discussion into action.

> who I am: I work as a operartions engineer at a data centre in Europe
> and formerly I worked for several years as a development engineer in 
> SDN
> networking area.
>
> Your project has caught my attention for its corageous mission. I am
> strongly interested in bringing forward civic from a computing
> technicial perspective and I see me fit to do so.

> I haven't had any experience in working in linux collab projects yet 
> and
> there are quite many projects in linux collab. So to help me decide 
> if
> participating in your project is the right endeavor for me: please,
> answer me a few questions, although those can seem a little blunt.

I think it is very wise for anyone considering participating in a 
community, to understand the agenda and scope before committing. So your 
questions are entirely reasonable. I'm not sure CIP yet has thorough 
answers, but I will try....

> Is it at all imperative for you gathering together individuals to 
> solve
> technicial intricacies or is it rather a tightly financial sponsor
> interests guided project, and therefore for the members of the 
> sponsors?

CIP is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, with a small number of 
founder member organisations [2] who are in effect the sponsors. As you 
can see from [2] the emphasis is currently on companies rather than 
individuals.

> Are extraneous forces really welcome?

I consider myself an extraneous force also, and am waiting to see what 
the answer is :-)

Our lack of response to your original email must have been a 
disappointing welcome for you, and I hope some other participants will 
respond to clarify properly.

> To what level in software terms do you want to bring about 
> innovations?
> You are speaking abstractly about a platform and glue mechanisms. To
> what extend? Down to the driver level?

Overall I think CIP is aiming more to increase confidence and 
reliability in relevant software, rather than bring about innovations. 
IMO it would be clearly unwise to put absolutely latest/unstable 
software into (for example) a nuclear power station before verifying its 
performance over a period of time. But I think we *need* to see some 
innovations in processes, and validation, and reproducibility, and long 
term maintenance of deep systems software - including all the way down 
to how driver level code is done.

Others may disagree of course - i hope they speak up! :)

> Are there opportunities for individuals or is it rather meant to 
> cheaply
> tap into ressources? Can one ascend therein?

For CIP I must leave this to other members. However you may be 
interested a separate thread of discussions on another community list, 
about Trustable Software Engineering [2] which I think has some 
complementary and overlapping aims. For sure I can say that individual 
contributors are welcome there, and I'm hoping that the content will 
prove to be of interest to the CIP community also.

br
Paul


[1] 
http://lists.cip-project.org/pipermail/cip-dev/2016-June/000003.html
[2] https://www.cip-project.org/faq
[3] 
https://lists.veristac.io/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/trustable-software