Table of Contents

Date

07 Feb 2017

Attendees

Actions items from previous meetings

• Peter Monks to communicate WG eligibility rules to WG chairs (as part of governance refinements comms)
• Peter Monks investigate alternative voting mechanisms and report back to the ESCo
• Peter Monks: to coordinate development of a proposal for working group status reporting
  
• All: review project reporting proposal and provide feedback
• Former user (Deleted): work with Maurizio Pillitu to finalise CI / CD of symphony-java-client against the ODP
• Michael Harmon: draft the proposal for the new "grace period" lifecycle state
  
  • Peter Monks: schedule an email vote to approve the new state
• Former user (Deleted): coordinate with Peter Monks to get an overview of the projects that have been delivered
• Michael Harmon: get approval to contribute the Python-based "test client" as an open source project
• All: review slides 7-14 of the 2017 objectives deck, to get a sense of the execution plan and priorities of the Foundation team
• All: review slide 15 of the 2017 objectives deck, especially the third bullet point, and plan out how your ESCo participation can be used to foster greater engagement by you / your firm
• Peter Monks: introduce Former user (Deleted) and Former user (Deleted) regarding possible Foundation marketing events
• Peter Monks: work with Former user (Deleted) to identify potential hackathon opportunities
• Former user (Deleted): come back to Former user (Deleted) with feedback on third point of proposed revisions to Desktop Wrapper WG charter
• Former user (Deleted): update the group after his conversation with Jim Adams on interoperability
• Lawrence Miller (Deactivated): send Former user (Deleted) suggested revisions to sentence structure for the revised Desktop Wrapper WG charter
• Former user (Deleted): invite Jim Adams (or someone on his team) to discuss interoperability at next week's Desktop Wrapper WG meeting

Agenda

Meeting notes

• Quorum not achieved, but no votes scheduled for today

• "Grace period” proposal

  • Mike not present, so can't review the proposal
  • Peter: is the request described in  Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration.  aligned with the grace period idea?
    • John: yep
    • James: yes - we went to encourage the LLC to contribute, however we can
    • John: yes being lenient to encourage the LLC to contribute is good
    • James: if it doesn’t happen after the 6 week period we might have an issue, but it seems generally aligned
    • Lawrence: it would still be coming in under Apache and available to the community.  If we wanted to enforce a release of it we could - any community member could do so.
    • James: yeah if people are messing around.
    • Lawrence: it’s like mutually assured destruction 😉
    • Peter: and the "stealth period" is time bound anyway
    • Lawrence: I’ll circle up with Mike and see if we need to draft something up
    • John: do we need a vote to special case this?
    • Peter: I don’t believe so, no, but the general case (i.e. adding the grace period to the project lifecycle) probably would 
    • John: agreed
• BoD meeting
  • Peter: the next BoD call is coming up on March 1st - we (the ESCo) should start preparing
  • James: if you could give us the project data, we can prepare the commentary.  There are different ways of looking at health of WGs e.g. participation, are they achieving their goals, etc.  In some ways it’s more an opinion of those in the WGs.
  • John: what we can observe is data around how actively are they meeting, how many members are there, how many commits they've made.  Some metadata that exists around the WG, that's like a project.  As some of these WGs have progressed past being a year old.
  • James: once we have the quantitative data, we can prepare the narrative and reach out to project owners & WG chairs and get their feel of what’s going on.
  • Peter: are you volunteering to be point person, James?
  • James: send the data to the list and we'll start drafting the narrative part
• ESCo elections:
  • Aaron: 2 seats on the ESCO (the 2 board leads) up for re-election in early May - John Stecher & Lawrence Miller.  Before we talk to the board about this, we wanted to ask the ESCo what you wanted to do with those seats, do you want to see the representation change in any particular direction?, etc.
  • John: does anyone have an opinion outside of myself and Lawrence?
  • James: we absolutely need someone from LLC in this - it doesn’t work without that.  It’s a little bit up to the board / LLC to decide who that is.
  • Aaron: there will always be an LLC appointee on the ESCo - it’s currently Mike and there’s no term limit on that seat - he serves at the LLC's sole discretion.
  • John: Lawrence have you chatted with Mike about this?
  • Lawrence: I think that our inclination would be to make the board seat that I’m sitting in available if the board wants.  My default position is that I’m not going to re-stand in the seat I’m in, and that that opens up the dynamic of allowing somebody else to step into the role and join the ESCo formally.  If the consensus of the board is that they want us to consider having 2 people, then we’d consider that too.
  • James: then the question is if you stepped out, have you had a conversation with Mike about who would take the LLC seat?
  • Lawrence: no, and there are advantages and disadvantages both ways - Mike, for example, sits in the engineering organisation while I don't.  We haven’t decided who it would be, if it were only to be one of us, and we can appoint whichever we wish.  I don’t think it’d matter much.
  • James: you could appoint week to week based on the topics.
  • Lawrence: I think we could, yes.
  • Aaron: yes we could.  Also, the ESCo has 3 advisors to appoint and could appoint either Mike or Lawrence to one of those slots.
  • Lawrence: we wouldn’t spend the time to send two people to this if we didn’t have voting power.  Just want to be transparent on that.
  • James: John are you going to put yourself forward for the other ESCo slot?
  • John: GS is, yes.  Me and John Madsen are going to sync up to find out who we want to appoint.  My role at GS has changed so we’re trying to decide who might be better.  e.g. Ben Dweick (sp?) is in the weeds daily with the platform.  We also have a number of different open source initiatives that Mo Rezaei runs, and we're considering whether it's best to have that person involved if we envisage the foundation as being more broad.  We want to make sure the initiative is as well supported as possible.
  • Lawrence: I’d also consider that whoever it is, both of these seats would be subject to elections.  You want to make sure you have a strong case for the person you’re putting up.
  • John: exactly, and this is why we want to have those internal discussions.
  • Peter: to clarify - the Board directors are the only voters for these seats?
  • Aaron: that’s correct.  We’d normally call for nominations 60 days before (early March), though that's not mandated by the by-laws.
  • Lawrence: is there general concurrence within this group that our (LLC) proposal to not run is the right thing to do?
  • John: I personally think it is.  I’d rather se more diversity of banks, outside people, etc.
  • Lawrence: I see this as a way to make people do stuff.
  • James: I’m in two minds.  I’d like to see you continue moving this forward, and a heavier LLC presence given the core parts of the Foundation and expectation from people is helpful.  I think that if you were not on the ESCo, we’d lose something.  I’d be open to how that happens, but if you don’t want to be on here in a non-voting seat, then that might be tricky.
  • Lawrence: if you’re settling out of it, I’d step out of it.
  • John: I’d like to see you continue, given the drive & motivation you bring to it.
  • James: yeah and how we achieve that I’d be open to different options.  Given the strong feelings that Gab has made with the Symphony open source project, it feels like having less Symphony LLC engagement in ESCo is not positive.  We’re not at the right balance point / maturity to have that happen, and I can see why other institutions would want to have that maturity first.
  • Lawrence: we’re not refusing to have 2 people involved - if there’s interest in that then we’d continue.
  • James: there's a good balance between you and Mike - engineering vs strategy.  Given we're not at that point of balance, I feel that not having both of you engaged will be problematic.
  • Nick: I tend to agree with James - having involvement from the LLC at this point is something we still need in a strong way.  I haven’t been involved in the ESCo for long, but in the WGs it’s something I’ve seen quite a bit.
  • Lawrence: we are happy to continue - we just want to make sure we’re not stepping in front of other organisations who want to get involved.  With more advisory seats we could see the objective of broadening the group.
  • James: how do we accommodate the desire to keep you involved?
  • Aaron: related question: is there any possibility that you would want to expand the number of voting seats on the ESCo?
  • James: that would solve the problem...
  • Lawrence: before we make that kind of change, why would we want to change it?  If we add 1, we could have a tie.  Add 2 and it’s a lot of people.
  • John: how many people ran for the seats we recently filled?
  • Arron: 2 for platinum advisor, 1 for gold advisor.  Project leads last year I’m not sure.
  • John: with two seats up, how many people are going to apply?  That might indicate a desire to grow the seats.
  • Aaron: everyone said it would be valuable to keep Mike & Lawrence, and that more diversity would be good, but that the LLC wants voting seats.
  • Lawrence: optically it looks weird for us to move from a voting seat to a non-voting seat.  I can’t think of any votes that have been contentious.  Changing my status from voting to non-voting - what message does that say?
  • James: I can see that.  I’d agree that maybe Lawrence you can have a think about it - maybe it’s moot in that there’s only one nomination.  Who’s thinking of coming on ESCo?  Maybe Deutsche? 
  • John: my understanding from Jim is that they’re interested.
  • Lawrence: we might look for broader consensus from board.  If we re-stood for the seat we’d want it to be consensus.  Second thought - if I re-stand for the seat, we might also open up one of our non-voting seat.  Then if I don’t run, we have one incumbent running for re-election, and a non-voting seat.  Either option creates an uncontested non-voting seat that allows someone else to join.
  • Aaron: we’re looking to go to the board beginning of March with ESCo’s general view.  If you want input from the board we might have a third conversation after that meeting.  Or perhaps ESCo just attends that call?
  • James: if we give them some feedback from this meeting - we value the LLC’s input generally, and Mike & Lawrence’s input specifically and we’d like that to continue and would like to figure out how to satisfy that.
  • Aaron: ok that’s what we’ll take to them.
  • Lawrence: one important question to relay back to the board - whether John you're going to stand or whether it’s someone else from Goldman. Providing clarity of intentions so people don’t view it differently - incumbent vs non-incumbent.  This might affect the election in some way.
  • John: yep and we’ll have that finalised in the next day or two.
  • Lawrence: yeah and we should reiterate that these seats are people seats, not company seats - I was elected when I was at Blackrock, for example, and kept the seat when I joined Symphony.

• AOB:

Action items

• Peter Monks: prepare project data and send to ESCo ML
• Aaron Williamson: prepare WG data and send to ESCo ML
• Former user (Deleted): confer internally with Former user (Deleted) re who from GS is best equipped to fill the upcoming ESCo project lead seat, and provide a name back to the ESCo
• Aaron Williamson: present ESCo perspective on upcoming ESCo project lead elections to the board, cc'ing the ESCo ML