Strategic Initiatives/Champions like we have on TSC

[mmarchini]

Maybe we should have something similar to TSC Strategic Initiatives and/or Champions in the Diagnostics WG. We had a lot of ideas during the Summit, and having Champions might help us to keep traction on the most important ones as well as keep track of what to work in the future. Also, as someone who's not part of the TSC, I really enjoy how easy it is to see what's being worked on and who's championing each initiative by just looking at https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/blob/master/Strategic-Initiatives.md (way easier than looking through all issues).

Below is an arbitrary example of what it would look like. If we decide to move forward with this we can decide what qualifies as an initiative later. What do you think?

Current Initiatives

Initiative	Champion	Links
Diagnostic Channel		#180
Async Hooks		#124
Async Context		#179
CPU Profiling		#148
Support tiers		#157
Trace Events		#84
Performance Profiles		#161

Need volunteers for

Initiative	Champion	Links
Time-travel debugging		#164
Platform neutrality

Completed

Initiative	Champion	Links
Post-mortem Debugging		llnode

[mike-kaufman]

Great idea @mmarchini. Let's discuss @ next WG meeting.

[mhdawson]

+1, I'll be the champion for getting node-report into core

[mhdawson]

Since I'm not going to make the meeting next week as I'm at a conference that day:

I'll add that I still want to get back to pulling some of the actions from the summit out so that we are not missing anything but just have not had time. I think adding this would be a good start and would make it easy to add in new ones. It would also give us a list to remind ourselves of what we wanted/agreed to push forward. For those with champions, we can get an update, for those without its a good place for people to see where they could contribute.

[jasnell]

Excellent idea. Eventually one of these weeks I'll be able to attend a diagnostics WG meeting but I'm willing to put my name down for the Trace Events bucket!

[mmarchini]

From our last meeting, @ofrobots raised some concerns about the Initiatives/Champions nomenclature. Maybe something like Topics and Owners would be a better fit for us. There were also some concerns about bureaucracy.

I think we have 3 main issues today:

• There are topics with low traction, which is fine, but we don't have a good way to visualize that
• We have a lot of issue fragmentation in our topics (see numbers below)
• It's hard to see actions for each topic. Sometimes to understand what actions were already taken and what's left to be done requires reading a few issues with a lot of comments each.

Trying to see how we could better organize our issues, I broke them down into categories based on topics. Here are the numbers I've got:

Trace Events: 12 issues
Async Hooks/Context: 6 issues
Cpu Profiling: 4 issues
Feature Requests: 6 issues
Meta/Meetings: 4 issues
Documentation: 4 issues
Diagnostic Channels: 1 issues
Performance Profiles: 1 issue
PSA: 1 issue

(Detailed list of issues on Gist to avoid flooding references on issues: https://gist.github.com/mmarchini/4aec1216545e6c7b7f57a41e19a36aa3)

For starters I think we could either start labeling our issues or we could use GitHub's Project feature. Later on we could think about introducing the owners/champions/whatever concept as well. This would at least help filtering issues and find stalled ones (maybe will also help closing duplicates or no longer valid issues). WDYT?

[mhdawson]

I still like the idea of some kind way to identify who is leading efforts so that people know who to talk to if they want to help out as well as who we expect to have updates on forward progress. I don't have strong feelings on what we call these people, but I think having the list is useful.

[kjin]

I looked into using the wiki for this. Though it's easy for anyone to edit, I think it's suboptimal for a few reasons --

• No notification/subscription system for updates
• No GitHub links integration (can't do things like @kjin or Strategic Initiatives/Champions like we have on TSC #185)
• Tertiary point of reference in most repos (after README, then issues)

For this reason it might be better to stick with issues and use the labels more liberally -- create labels like "champion-needed" and "awaiting-champion-feedback" etc. What do people here think?

Also, I was having trouble creating a central list of champions/stakeholders. I have right now just

• Diagnostics Channel - Next steps #180: @Qard
• [async_hooks] stable API - tracking issue #124 @ofrobots
• Async-context formalization and diagnostics support #107: @mike-kaufman (also I'm considering myself, @kjin, a stakeholder here)

I know there are others, but I missed most of today's diag WG meeting so I wasn't sure who else had been nominated as champions.

[mhdawson]

The alternative would just be a section in the README.md or another doc. At least for the top level list. I think its good to have an easily findable top level list (even if it points to the issues for more detail).

[mmarchini]

+1 on @mhdawson suggestion