Announcing Cloud Native Buildpacks Governance Changes

The Cloud Native Buildpacks project has come a long way in the last four years. Our success is due — in large part — to the strong community that’s grown to support the project. But as that community has grown, with more maintainers and teams contributing to the project, we’ve found that the governance structure we set in place years ago is no longer a good fit.

For this reason, we’re excited to announce a few changes to our current team and leadership structure. In particular, we’re introducing:

• A new Technical Oversight Committee (TOC)
• A new role of Team Lead for each CNB Team (formerly “Sub-Teams”)
• New voting requirements for the Request For Comments (RFC) process and other motions

We’re also eliminating the Core team from our governance structure, and reassigning the responsibilities of the Core team across the new TOC and Team Leaders.

Technical Oversight Committee

The CNB TOC is modeled on the CNCF TOC as a technical governing body. It oversees all aspects of the project and has a mandate to drive consensus for:

• Defining and maintaining the technical vision for the CNB project
• Defining the governance structure and teams of the CNB project
• Appointing Team Leads for each CNB Team
• Creating new teams, or removing existing teams
• Casting binding votes on RFCs
• Defining the annual roadmap
• Anything else that falls through the cracks

The TOC members will include all individuals originally belonging to the Core team plus a new member, Sambhav Kothari. The full TOC includes:

• Ben Hale (VMware)
• Emily Casey (VMware)
• Joe Kutner (Salesforce)
• Stephen Levine (VMware)
• Terence Lee (Salesforce)
• Sambhav Kothari (Bloomberg)

Unlike the Core team that existed previously, the TOC does not:

• Have an exclusive role in casting binding votes on RFCs
• Own the CNB spec and does not cast binding votes on spec PRs (since they are implementing a decision that was made via the RFC process)

The introduction of the TOC is an acknowledgement that the majority of day-to-day support for the project is no longer a function of a few exclusive members. Our project has grown, and our team structure must change too.

Teams & Team Leads

The CNB project will be composed of five teams that cover the different types of components maintained as part of the project. Each team will have a Team Lead, who plays an important role in the overall CNB Leadership. The Team Leads are:

• Javier Romero (Platform team)
• Natalie Arellano (Implementation team)
• Sambhav Kothari (BAT team)
• Joe Kutner (Distribution & Learning teams)

The Team Lead is appointed by the TOC to be responsible for:

• Casting binding votes on RFCs owned by their team
• Moving an RFC to a status of “voting”
• Assigning an end-date for voting on their team’s RFCs
• Delegating another maintainer from the same Team to temporarily fulfill these responsibilities

These teams are identical to the sub-teams in the previous structure, and they will have the same maintainers and contributors. In addition, the maintainer and contributor roles will remain the same. However, the CNB spec, which was previously owned by the Core Team, will be split into subsets that are owned by individual teams.

With teams now owning specific RFCs, we must also introduce a new model for finalizing those RFCs.

Voting Rules

Along with our team structure changes, the CNB project is also introducing new voting rules. All voting in the CNB project will adhere to a lazy consensus model. In order for an RFC, proposal, or other motion to pass, the following must hold true:

• There are no votes against the motion
• There is at least one vote in favor of the motion

The absence of a vote from a party with a binding vote in the process is considered to be a vote in the affirmative. Non-binding votes are welcomed and encouraged.

Congratulations

Above all, we’d like to thank and congratulate our new Team Leads, maintainers, and contributors. As our project has grown in size and popularity, our community has remains to be a welcoming and wonderful place to work.

For more details on specific aspects of these governance changes, please see the buildpacks/community documentation.