RFC 676: Contributor-Council-Charter.md

RFC-676-Contributor-Council-Charter.md

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+# CDK Contributor Council Charter (RFC) — November, 2024
+
+## Purpose of the Council
+
+To improve visibility into CDK, increase feedback opportunities, and build a stronger, more inclusive community, the AWS CDK team proposes forming a
+Contributor Council.
+
+*Original Author(s)*: [@haubles](https://github.com/haubles), [@billfine](https://github.com/billfine)
+
+*Tracking Issue*: https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk-rfcs/issues/676
+
+## Principles guiding this RFC
+
+1. **Maintain AWS supportability.** In order for AWS to provide on-call resources tasked with resolving high-impact bugs or issues in CDK for
+customers and the community, AWS must ensure that its standards for processes—for example, security reviews—are met. Therefore, AWS controls
+the CDK release process.
+2. **Increase community influence**. The community’s input and active engagement is essential for the long-term health and success of the CDK
+project. Therefore, AWS is committed to creating more robust and clearly-defined channels for soliciting community feedback, and acting on that
+feedback. We are committed to increasing opportunities and building new processes for accepting more community contributions to the codebase.
+3. **Provide visibility into AWS-led initiatives.** We will provide the CDK’s community with visibility into our roadmap and AWS-led contributions.
+We will give the community a voice and a hand in our decision-making processes. We must communicate our roadmaps, plans, and decisions openly and
+promptly, and deliver on them consistently, for the long-term success of CDK.
+
+## Decision-making by the Council
+
+The Council will meet monthly to start, but may increase or decrease meeting frequency at its discretion. Similarly, the length of the meetings will
+be determined by the Council and can be increased or decreased at the Council’s discretion. We anticipate Council members will spend less than 5
+hours a month on Council activities.
+
+Portions of the sessions will be recorded and published to YouTube. Discussion topics under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) will be redacted from
+the recording before it is published.
+
+### The Council meetings include two sections
+
+(1) Town hall
+
+* The AWS CDK team will report on project release priorities and the status of AWS-led features in each Council meeting. Council members will have
+an opportunity to ask questions and deliver feedback.
+* Community representatives will report on news and share updates on community-led features. Council members will have an opportunity to ask
+questions and deliver feedback.
+
+(2) New proposals
+
+* The Council will review and debate RFCs/features, feature docs, or new processes brought forth by the CDK community and AWS. AWS may not be able
+to report on all AWS-led projects when we are bound by legal requirements, customer agreements, or when it would put AWS at a competitive
+disadvantage to report on some project.
+* Anyone in the CDK community may propose topics for discussion by the Council. The agenda is finalized one week before each meeting to allow time
+for pre-reading and preparation. Proposers are invited to the meeting to present and advocate for their change. If they are unable to attend,
+their attendance is not required for the Council to make a decision.
+* The Council discusses the change’s appropriateness, merits, scope of work, and whether the change can be community-led or if it will be built by
+internal Amazon resources.
+* Decisions are completed and recorded through the following mechanism:
+  * Each Council member enters an opinion on whether the feature is viable including a short explanation. The opinions and reasons behind them are
+recorded on the change proposal. Opinion submissions follow the [Chatham House Rule](https://www.ibabs.com/en/glossary/chatham-house-rule/#:~:text=The%20Chatham%20House%20Rule%20reads,')
+by default, though Council members may choose to sign them.
+  * If the change is deemed appropriate for inclusion in CDK by the Council, the AWS CDK Product team decides whether the feature will be built by
+AWS and adds it to their feature backlog, or if the feature will be offered to the community for implementation.
+  * If a change is deemed to be appropriate for community-led development, the label 'open-for-community-contribution' will be added to the feature
+request.
+  * It is preferred that community-led features are code-reviewed by a
+[Distinguished Contributor](https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#badges-pilot-program) before AWS reviews them.
+    * If a Distinguished Contributor is not available within 30 days, AWS will review.
+    * The feature needs to adhere to all AWS development and security processes, which AWS will publish on the CDK GitHub. AWS is committed to
+providing all the required resources for timely reviews and merging.
+    * Those who build a feature through to completion are recognized in a manner to be determined.
+
+## Structure of the Council
+
+The Council is led by two Chairpersons. They do not submit opinions in the decision-making process:
+
+* One Co-Chair and the facilitator of Council sessions will come from the AWS Open Source Strategy & Marketing (OSSM) team.
+* The other Co-Chair is the AWS CDK Product Lead. They set the priorities for AWS resources, but do not have veto power over what the community can
+or can’t work on.
+
+Amazon will have five permanent members on the Council, which AWS may rotate as necessary. They will represent various AWS teams with vested
+interests in CDK to bring a multiplicity of viewpoints and experiences to Council debate (Engineering, Support, OSSM).
+
+The community will have five elected members on the Council.
+
+* The community representatives will be nominated and chosen by the CDK community through a public, time-constrained mechanism which permits
+transparency into the mechanism and allows the community to self-identify—and make an informed decision about—people who are actively looking to
+make deeper investment into CDK.
+* In order to participate in the full-breadth of conversation related to CDK and the project’s roadmap, Council members will be required to sign an
+NDA.
+* The five elected community representatives serve one-year terms. There is no limit to the number of subsequent terms a Council member may serve.
+Depending on community input, the AWS CDK team may decide to allocate a certain number of Council seats to specific community groups, such as the
+Open Construct Foundation, or Enterprise Customers. The rest of the seats would be undesignated.
+* We expect Council members to regularly attend Council meetings. If a Council member has two unannounced absences in a row, they will be removed
+and the Council will decide how to replace them.
+
+## First priority of the Council
+
+After the Council is elected, our desire is for the Council to immediately get to work evolving CDK. Their first tasks may include but are not
+limited to:
+
+* Co-definition of the Council (new processes, working groups, etc.)
+* Contributing to the AWS CDK roadmap
+* Building a prioritized list of proposed changes for debate
+
+# FAQ
+
+## What are we launching today?
+
+Today, AWS announces the formation of a Contributor Council, which will serve as a trusted advisor to AWS on CDK’s vision, direction, and
+day-to-day maintenance/management. It marks our first step toward greater engagement and transparency with the entire community on project strategy
+and operations.
+
+This RFC also kicks off a period of community input about the Council and its Charter, which will last for 30 days. On February 10, 2025, we will
+incorporate the feedback and ratify the Charter by merging it to the CDK repository.
+
+We encourage commenters to build on similar ideas and \+1 feedback from others, to help AWS understand an idea’s overall importance to the
+community.
+
+We are also sharing our desire to partner with community members and organizations like the Open Constructs Foundation (OCF) to form working groups.
+
+We envision these working groups as mechanisms for building alongside and in mutual benefit for the entire community. We suggest, but are not
+limited or tied to, several areas of interest: Distinguished Contributors, community-led constructs, community rewards, and/or events (summits, bug
+bashes, CDK Day, et cetera).
+
+If you are interested in joining a working group, or have an idea for one not listed here, please fill out this [form](https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk-rfcs/issues/new?assignees=&labels=working-group-suggestion%2Cneeds-review&projects=&template=committee-suggestion.yml&title=%5BWorking+Group+Suggestion%5D%3A+).
+
+## Why should I participate in the Contributor Council?
+
+The CDK Contributor Council provides an opportunity for community-elected representatives to provide input to and directly influence the AWS
+decision-making process.
+
+Council members will also gain firsthand knowledge and participatory experience with AWS mechanisms and culture by working alongside AWS CDK
+Engineering & Support teams.
+
+The entire community will gain more visibility into the AWS CDK team’s project roadmap and decision-making process through the Council’s open
+sessions.
+
+We are not currently planning on but are open to extending additional responsibilities and/or privileges to Council members such as triage rights,
+tagging, labeling, etc.
+
+## Why are we doing this?
+
+AWS is committed to implementing changes that empower the community to build alongside our teams. We believe that bringing the community into our
+processes will help sustain the project, and open more doors for contributions to the codebase.
+
+We think the CDK project will benefit with more open, clearly-defined channels for information and feedback to flow between AWS, CDK’s contributors,
+and its users.
+
+We know the community has valuable insight into how CDK can evolve, so we want to build a stronger connection to the community, with a direct
+channel to get their feedback.
+
+## Why should we *not* do this? What alternative solutions did you consider
+
+The Contributor Council is one aspect of the investments AWS is making into CDK. In terms of improving community engagement and feedback mechanisms,
+AWS considered three other options for evolving the project.
+
+* **Change nothing.** With this approach, we would continue to work on improving mechanisms, building transparency, feature prioritization, and
+creating a modern roadmap for CDK. Despite our continued commitment to the mission of the AWS CDK and though we would strive to do the right thing
+for our customers and the community, we decided that this approach may not bring enough meaningful change to the mechanisms that define how we work
+with the community.
+* **Transition to product.** Another approach we considered was transitioning the project to a product, making it internally owned and managed. The
+team would continue to remain dedicated to supporting the service and prioritizing feature and bug work, but the community would need to go through
+more traditional mechanisms to interact with the team, slowing down the feedback loop. We felt that this would have created more barriers between
+us and the community, and further removed transparency. Ultimately, this would not achieve what we wanted.
+* **Transition to community led.** Another approach we considered was adopting a fully community-led governance model. In this approach, AWS would
+implement a governance model without corporate sponsorship or oversight, and discontinue offering on-call support resources. In this eventuality,
+we may have reduced the engineering resources assigned to CDK. We decided against this approach, because we believe the community ultimately does
+want to control CDK at the cost of the benefits AWS-controlled releases processes provide.
+
+We also considered that the community may not feel that this Council and its Charter go far enough in opening up CDK for contributions and
+community engagement. However, given the security and supportability terms required by the customer agreements we hold with CDK users, it is
+important that we make careful and deliberate decisions as we open up our internal processes and roadmaps for community engagement. We look
+forward to working alongside the community as we take additional steps in the future.
+
+## What does this mean for Projen? CDK8s?
+
+The Contributor Council’s remit does not include Projen or CDK8s at this time. Currently, the AWS CDK team is conducting research and soliciting
+customer feedback about those projects, and plans to determine next steps based on those inputs. If you are interested in or have ideas about
+Projen or CDK8s, please feel free to share it on the tracking issue for this RFC.
+
+## What is the high-level project plan?
+
+Timing and processes are to be determined alongside the community, and are subject to change as we learn and build together.
+
+### Phase One — Community Input
+
+* This RFC PR kicks off a 30-day period of community input.
+* Community input will be gathered from this PR, the [TRACKING-ISSUE](https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk-rfcs/issues/676), and the
+[Working Group Interest Form](https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk-rfcs/issues/new?assignees=&labels=working-group-suggestion%2Cneeds-review&projects=&template=committee-suggestion.yml&title=%5BWorking+Group+Suggestion%5D%3A+).
+* After 30 days, the AWS CDK team will incorporate community input into CONTRIBUTOR-COUNCIL-CHARTER.md.
+* The Charter will be considered ratified upon merging CONTRIBUTOR-COUNCIL-CHARTER.md into the CDK repository.
+
+### Phase Two — Contributor Council Elections
+
+* Upon ratification, the AWS OSSM team will begin the process of soliciting representative nominations from the community. The AWS CDK team will
+select representatives from within AWS/Amazon.
+* The exact process and the nomination/voting tooling will be determined with input from the community alongside the community input period.
+* We plan to complete the nomination and voting period by February 28, 2025\.
+
+### Phase Three — First Contributor Council Open Session
+
+* Once the Contributor Council Elections are complete, we will begin scheduling and planning the first Contributor Council session.
+* We expect to hold the first Contributor Council meeting in early March, 2025\. Sessions will be held on a monthly basis (subject to change, per
+the Working Group).
+* The Council meetings will be recorded and posted on YouTube, along with links to any additional materials or action items stemming from sessions.
+Some portions of the recording and/or materials may be redacted, if a topic discussed is covered by an NDA.
+
+### Phase Four — Test and Iterate
+
+* The Council will build, document, test, and iterate on its processes with input from the community.
+* The AWS CDK team will monitor the Council’s impact and the community’s sentiments about it. After a year, the Council may choose to alter or
+disband itself.
+
+## What does success look like?
+
+The Council’s ability to succeed is dependent on the community’s continued interest in participating as Council members and as engaged
+constituents. So, the AWS CDK team will measure the Council’s success on interest and participation in the election process, viewership and
+engagement with the Council meeting materials, and participation in working groups. The Council’s success is ultimately the project’s success, so
+the AWS CDK team will also monitor project health metrics around the RFC process, contributions, and issues that signal the Council’s success.
+
+### Examples
+
+* Number of nominees in first and second election, percent of contributors that vote
+* Number of working groups formed, participation, and the success of their activities
+* Views and comments on tracking issue, clicks-through to RFC from blog and social media
+* Number of repeat contributors, number of community-led RFCs build, issues remedied