Table of Contents

Date

21 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
  • 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
  • Lawrence Miller (Deactivated): invite Jim Adams to a future ESCo meeting

Agenda

Meeting notes

• Quorum is achieved - we have a full house + guests!
• FOS WG chair discussion:
  
  • Peter: background is that the FOS WG has been operating without a co-chair, and in December decided to put their biweekly meetings on hold due to lack of participation.  They intended to continue a low level of collaboration via their mailing list.
  • James: are they working now?
  • Aaron: they've stopped meeting.
  • Nick: I'm on the WG, and the regular meetings disbanded in December - a number of meetings before that that had very little activity.  I haven't seen these email threads at all, so I can't say that from my PoV there's been a lot of engagement.  It seems specific to people publishing apps on Symphony, which is not our area of interest.
  • Lawrence: I'm not formally on the WG, but I've attended some meetings in the past.  The rationale for stopping the meetings was to due to the level of activity & engagement  There was a feeling the meetings were too frequent given the level of engagement from people building custom objects.  This was some of the original motivation for temporarily halting the calls, with email as a fallback until there's more engagement.
  • Peter: my assessment is that suspension of the meetings was a case of poor timing and misreading of demand signals.  The platform capabilities required for participants to start defining custom object capabilities didn't land in Symphony until the November release (v1.44 IIRC?), which is right around the time the chair decided to discontinue the meetings due to lack of engagement.  But the participants couldn't easily engage anyway, since they didn't have ready access to the capabilities - this was misread as a lack of engagement.  Since then there have been clear signals of interest (e.g. from Goldman and FactSet) in collaborating on the definition of custom objects, and while FactSet attempted to collaborate via the mailing list, it clearly wasn't an effective forum.
  • Gab: and in terms of growing engagement, BNY & HSBC have also nominated more members for the WG.
  • James: then as ESCo, would we recommend it gets rebooted?  It sounds like it's stopped, and the ML only has 4 emails on it.  Should we reboot it and push for a new chair?
  • John: the chair & co-chair have to have something specific to go after - a project.  An attainable goal that gets everyone rallied around something tangible.  It should be rebooted at the very least.
  • Lawrence: the question comes down to who should chair / co-chair.  I agree in concept for this group to be restarted, but it all comes down to who will lead the work.
  • James: the current chair is Bruce, correct?
  • Lawrence: correct.
  • James: is the first step to have a word with Bruce to see if he sees the value and has the bit between his teeth, and ask him to select a co-chair?
  • Lawrence: it would work smoothest if we have some volunteers in mind.  I suspect Bruce will say "I'm happy for someone else to take the reins".
  • James: as a chair of one of these WGs, we need the right person to move it forward, and so it has to be people who are interested in the work.  We can't have that conversation without first talking to Bruce.
  • Lawrence: from talking to Bruce he's open to having someone else run it.  I don't think that'll be particularly controversial.
  • James: why don't we take it in steps - check that it's not controversial with Bruce, then reach out to all members of the WG suggesting we want to reboot it, and ensure they're driving the right things.
  • Mike: agree with James - we should let the group decide.  From what I've seen there are some strong candidates who would jump at the chance.
  • Nick: my observation with Desktop Wrapper WG is that shifting the discussion to one where we're approaching the problem set via industry standards across platforms - things that could apply outside Symphony and have the WG focused on defining those kinds of standards first, then mapping to implementations - has been really helpful to reinvigorate that WG.  I really commend James for leading that effort.  I think we might want to look at FOS WG in a similar way - it could be addressing, at an industry level, without necessary focusing on how it works in Symphony itself, so that there's interoperability between Symphony and other platforms.  Identifiers is a perfect example of that - the last thing we need is another set of siloed identifiers in the financial world.
  • James: my recollection is that the charter explicitly called this out.
  • Lawrence: yes this was fundamental to the structure of the group.
  • Nick: right, but the proposals have been very coupled to the Symphony message format.  That makes sense for a Symphony implementation, but it will drive more engagement if we approach it from the point of "how do we define these structures so that they can be implemented in Symphony and other platforms".
• Upcoming ESCo elections:
  • Lawrence: we've been looking offline at a draft email as a communication to the board and there's been some questions about how should we approach this.  I think there are 2 things that we were trying to convey in the note that Aaron put together, and I wanted to make sure we covered them in a discussion here at ESCo.  The first suggestion is that the note should include some explicit explanation of what the criteria are, outlining what the basis is for where we think the candidates should be coming from.  I believe the link goes to some of the criteria we used in the 2016 elections and our thinking at the time.  Obviously that was in the context of bringing new people in, rather than replacing existing seats, so there might be some differences.  I think there's a question of updating that set of criteria and then there's questions of "are we trying to provide the board with a clear piece of guidance from ESCo, and if so what is that piece of guidance and are we all on the same page with that guidance."  Thoughts?
  • James: given I'm not one of the 2 in question, I'd reiterate that we've found the current members' contributions good, and it was quite difficult for us to imagine how we'd continue without Lawrence and John in their current seats to be able to get the kind of influence we want over the organisation, and so our comment was that we're very happy with the people currently in the seats.  While also recognising that we also want to get wider participation from other members, without "blowing up" the voting.
  • Frank: the recommendation is completely valid, but how would we re-elect these two positions?  I want to make sure we're following the charter so we don't set a precedent for how votes are conducted.  Lawrence to your point, staggering the vote and having individual elections is a good idea.
  • John: agreed - that's much more palatable.
  • Lawrence: the most important thing is to make sure the staggering population is spaced out.  You might eventually go for a bigger staggering than a month - 6 months or something like that.  Maybe we should evaluate the number of voting seats, and whether we want the non-voting seats staggered?  The question is always going to be how we leg into it.  We probably want to make whatever staggering effective in future elections and also existing seats, but how do we do that?  Do we want to follow the US Senate model, where different "classes" are used?  When new states are added they use a coin flip to decide.  I could sit down and look at that, but do we want to introduce staggering on a go-forward basis, and/or retro-active staggering?  Given the terms are only 2 years it might make more sense to just implement it go-forward.
  • Frank: I would say one quarter for staggering, so we're not waiting too long.  Moving forward setting up the rules in accordance with what we've described here.  The ESCo seats yes, and the sub-committee seats are on the same time as the other seats.
  • Lawrence: if we have a 2 year term, quarterly works well - that would be 5 seats to be voted over 8 quarters.  Past that point we're looking at overlapping the non-voting seats - perhaps with two classes for voting and non-voting seats.
  • Frank: that seems to work - does anyone think it's overkill?
  • James: this is just to avoid having bake-offs between candidates?
  • Lawrence: to avoid having people that are supposed to be working together competing against each other for seats.  To allow other people to join without being involved in a mixed election or having to challenge someone in a direct run-off, and to avoid having people running off against each other for voting and non-voting seats.
  • Aaron: a couple of things: first, only 2 of the ESCo members are elected by the Board, the others are elected by the members at large.  So I'm not sure if that last point is entirely valid - we wouldn't be going to the board that often.  Secondly, there is already effectively staggering between the board leads and the member leads - Frank and James were elected in May 2016, and won't be up for re-election until May 2018.
  • Lawrence: that compounds the issue in that they're competing against each other.
  • Aaron: right, but any proposed staggering system needs to take that existing staggering into account.
  • Lawrence: that there are already two classes makes the cycles work better.
  • James: so I think we want to make two points here: election mechanics & staggering.  Then what we want to say to the board regarding the upcoming board seats themselves.  Any other feedback on the email Aaron sent out?
  • Lawrence: one question I'd asked: is there general agreement that we should include general information on criteria that we feel are relevant?
  • Aaron: it would be easy enough to include a sentence on that, with links out to the wiki.
  • Lawrence: how do other folks feel about that?  I'm obviously in favour of it!  
  • James: I'm happy for it.  If I were on the board, I'd be asking "why" - why is ESCo recommending what they've said, and what the rationale is.  But with board members on the ESCo perhaps that would be carried across anyway?
  • Lawrence: there may be more explanation that would help.
  • James: the criteria help, but are not complete.
  • John: given the diversity of people on the board, what do we think would be enough information?
  • James: what's the rationale?  If I'm DB and I really want an ESCo seat, I think I'd want to know why Mike, Lawrence and John remain?  I'd want to know why the ESCo is recommending that.
  • John: what should that statement be?
  • James: influence over LLC is one of the things we've talked about in some depth and Goldman's original & continued engagement in driving technical direction  - that's my recollection of where we came from.
• Board update:
  • James: I'm suggesting that we show delta trends since last board meeting.  That's the more meaningful thing.  I don't think there are any ESCo decisions that we'd want to communicate to the board?  WG updates - I can provide a couple of bullets from Desktop wrapper, we may want to say a thing or two about FOS WG.  Can we reach out to Anthony re API WG?
  • Peter: yes please feel free to reach out to Anthony & Paul
  • James: do we want to say anything about the moribund working groups?
  • Gabriele: re open source readiness we've seen a lot of interest from the board.  Whether it's a working group or something else remains to be seen.  I would let Aaron drive the conversation there - as we plan to drive it in H1.  Regarding security, there has been no change.
  • James: ok so security WG is moribund, potentially move to "cancelled".  Open source readiness WG is .  Interoperability WG is half-proposed by DB - I think we should bring that up.  Any specific asks from ESCo to the board, beyond generally driving engagement?  Ok so pretty pictures - projects over time, projects per organisation, commits over time, and contribution time and status.  My only comment is that we should collapse these down to fewer slides, and add a dot to show where we were at the last BoD meeting was.
  • Gabriele: keeping in mind I need the slides Monday 27th.
  • Peter: I'll re-snap the data on Sunday 26th, send the graphs to James, you can spend your Monday updating the slides, ready for Gab.
• Minuet socialisation:
  • Gab: the great news is that as of this morning we have Minuet open sourced () - thanks Mike, Lawrence, Aaron and Peter for getting this over the line, and John for his earlier work on the Goldman CCLA.  The big objective was to have it out before the next BoD meeting, and we've achieved that.  Now in terms of launching this, I was working on the expectation of not having a major launch, since it's been a year since we started this work and there are other projects () that are more strategic.  I would like a blog post stating that Minuet is out, but secondly I wanted to give the community clarity on the more general desktop wrapper context. So one thought I had was to have the Desktop Wrapper WG give a more general update on what they're focused on and how it relates to the Minuet and SymphonyElectron projects.  That was my thinking and I wanted to gauge the ESCo opinion on how we should be messaging Minuet?
  • James: the only thing is that I have to write something and run it past Lawrence to make sure I'm representing the LLC strategy appropriately.
  • Lawrence: I'm happy to provide feedback on that.
  • Gab: thanks James.  We can also help with that.  The reason was mostly to have a 3rd party do it is a stronger message than having it come from Symphony or the Foundation.  More importantly, having the angle coming from the Desktop Wrapper WG shows that there is alignment and orchestration between these seemingly disconnected initiatives.  The idea was to provide deeper perspective from the WG.  But to wrap up, a simple blog post stating the facts is good for now, then after the BoD meeting James you'll do a more general WG announcement?
  • James: I'm happy to draft something - I'll just need some time to do it.
  • Gab: great - it isn't urgent.
• AOB:
  • None - meeting adjourned

Action items

• Michael Harmon: chat with Bruce regarding FOS WG chair / co-chair
  
  • Bruce to solicit volunteers from the FOS WG for chair and/or co-chair roles.
• Lawrence Miller (Deactivated): ESCo voting mechanics / staggering
• Former user (Deleted): draft criteria / rationale for BoD recommendation regarding upcoming ESCo elections
• Aaron Williamson: ping Anthony & Paul, cc'ing Former user (Deleted) asking for a brief status update on API WG
• Former user (Deleted): draft an announcement regarding recent Desktop Wrapper WG activity, and how it relates to SymphonyElectron and Minuet open source projects
  
  • Lawrence Miller (Deactivated): review that draft and make sure it's aligned with LLC strategy