RFC: StackStorm Partners, Code of Conduct and Economy

[arm4b]

StackStorm Open Source project has a global, diverse community. We want a productive, happy and agile community that can improve, foster collaboration between groups with very different needs, interests and skills. Code is built on basic principles of conduct that give us the guidance and support we need to move the project forward, respecting interest of the different community layers behind the project. It is about “living integrity” and acting in a trustworthy manner towards our users.

The important priority for StackStorm Open Source project is community health and growth. It's within everyone's interest to help growing the community. Side effect is that project popularity will give the StackStorm Partners more potential commercial requests, more exposure, adoption cases and reasons to invest in the project via development and contributions.

Also remember that any Linux Foundation project has its lifecycle. If project shows insufficient growth, community health, lack of diversity, adoption, contributions, - it may be archived.

We should strive for the ethical community health. Per Technical Charter we all agreed with the following:

The Project will engage in the work of the Project in a professional manner consistent with maintaining a cohesive community, while also maintaining the goodwill and esteem of LF Projects, LFP, Inc. and other partner organizations in the open source community.

Our ecosystem is made up of several groups of individuals and organizations which can roughly be divided into 3 groups:

1. Companies using StackStorm in production where st2 is part of their business pipeline and investing in their OSS stack by dedicating engineers to involve in the project processes/releases/development/reviews/security/etc.
2. Professional Services companies providing Consulting/Solutions and contributing to st2. By being active part of the TSC, supporting the project and having deep experience in st2 core via submitting bug reports, or fixing issues for users, pushing features and doing maintenance gives you an extra expertise that others don't have.
3. Users, or those who add value to the project through their adoption, support, being active in community by asking questions, giving feedback as consumers, eg. broader Community.

Open Source Economy

Open Source is not possible without the economical moving power behind it. We are lucky when we started organizing the TSC, - it already included several commercial-interested parties contributing to the OSS project. It's also a good time for the project to be graduated to the Linux Foundation when there are such programs available like Github Sponsors and Community Bridge to support Open Source projects by their Communities.

Partners Page Plan

In order to help StackStorm TSC members Professional Services companies justify their investment in project maintenance and support, StackStorm creates a Partners Page (https://stackstorm.com/partners/). We'll redirect any incoming commercial requests to that page and so the potential customer could choose best partner suitable for them. This provides necessary unbiased neutrality in suggesting the partner without conflict of interest situations. StackStorm will make this page visible and promote it where possible. A few examples:

• Slack On-boarding Message
• Slack Topic in Channels
• Initial Blog Post (announcement)
• Initial Email Newsletter referencing Partners Page (announcement)
• Twitter + LinkedIn cover (announcement)
• Email On-Boarding Automation (replace EWC campaigns with the StackStorm Partners)
• Website (add Partners page on the visible place)
• sales emails: @stackstorm.com: we naturally receiving lots of potential customer requests emails every month from the Fortune 500 companies. As we grow the project popularity, - the incoming requests would increase too.
• Docker, K8s, Vagrant (mention the Partners Page on shell login, as before with Enterprise)
• st2docs (?)

This is a great opportunity for Partners to succeed at this early stage.
Now the question to the Partners: As stackstorm provides such an exclusive opportunity for the Partners, comparing to other maintainers who spend similar level of dedication and effort in supporting the project, how else can you help?
As we announce the StackStorm Partners, it becomes naturally obvious to the broader Community that StackStorm expenses are on the partners shoulders. We encourage StackStorm Partners to be supportive and donate to the project needs via Community Bridge (https://funding.communitybridge.org/projects/stackstorm) as companies who commercially benefit from the project and getting stream of customer requests that previously were handled by EWC aka StackStorm Enterprise offering.

Conflicts of interest

An example of conflict interest is a person occupying two social roles simultaneously which generate opposing benefits and actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest (example: StackStorm TSC maintainer and StackStorm for-profit service company employee).

We expect maintainers to be aware and disclose when they are conflicted due to the projects they are involved in and avoid conflict of interest situations: abstain proposals or delegate decisions that may be seen to be self-interested as well as avoid use of administrative resources for the secondary non-TSC interest. We expect that everyone who participates in the project does so with the goal of making life better for the TSC and community via fair unbiased decisions.

Perceived conflicts of interest are important to address, - seek for 3rd party evaluation by discussing with the StackStorm TSC group. Act to ensure that decisions or proposals are credible and will maintain the reputation of the StackStorm toward its open source community and Linux Foundation's vision of the cohesive, healthy project, especially when actions are difficult or favorable to the interests of one group over another.

TSC Conflicts of interest situations

StackStorm can't operate as any other open-core project where commercial business is built on top of OSS, it's not a business anymore. Project belongs to the Linux Foundation and should fit their vision of healthy, growing, neutral and diverse community. Remember that outside of the ST2 Partners there are Maintainers/Contributors which are using st2 in production that have their vision about the OSS project as well as the broader Community. TSC should realize different interest levels. Any commercial party aggressively pushing their interest will lead to disbalance and problems.
Just a few examples there are not tolerated, up to exclusion from the TSC. Common denominator between them is conflict of interest:

• Use own TSC role, administrative privilege, special permissions or access in order to serve the business/commercial interest.
• Query, Filter, Search, Parse any ST2 resources to benefit from commercially.
• It's also not possible to share the project User Base/Community DB with the Partners. This is unhealthy method and also comes against the LF Privacy Policy. See Webinars below what's recommended instead.
• Send mass messages.
• Advertising in Community. Eg. "We're company X, providing services Y". We don't want to scare out our Community with professional services.
• Trying to find the cracks in agreements like "What's not prohibited is allowed". TSC Partners shouldn't seek where are the Linux Foundation and OSS project community limits.
• Be careful when a contribution belonging to the same company is approved by the TSC member of that company. StackStorm feature set belongs to the community and TSC collectively may decide whether they want a particular feature, change or not in the roadmap or part of the project direction. For serious/major PR changes we'd recommend to ask additional 3rd party review when such situations occur.
• Giving access to 3rd parties to st2 resources outside of the TSC. No external marketeer, designer, copywriter, SEO specialist or whoever could be directly involved. That's a situation when the project relies on 3rd parties is an example that has high chances for conflict of interest. We can cooperate with Partners, but maintain our own resources ourselves inside the TSC.
• Any other Conflict of Interest situations. It's recommended to discuss in the #TSC and get all groups involved.

Recommended ways to Market

There are recommended ways to benefit from the project and getting marketing exposure, - please use them.

• Donate $ to the project as a company and get additional Marketing exposure as st2 supporter. Ex: https://twitter.com/Stack_Storm/status/1278763890734706688
• Write a blog post
  • how-to
  • tutorials
  • demos, use cases
  • technical challenges
• Write a guest stackstorm blog post
  • we'll include short info about the Partner & its services in the blog footer (example)
• Write a Case study, Client Success story, etc
• Organize Meetups. Establish your company as a local leader in Event-Driven-Automation, Remediation, etc. We'll be happy to promote that from the StackStorm side, including posting guest blogs, publishing videos on st2 youtube channel, etc.
• Organize Online Webinars (see below)
• Any other ideas? Please chime in and let's discuss.

Special case: Webinars

This is what Linux Foundation recommended and it's pretty common practice in the LF/CNCF ecosystem for Professional Companies to market and work with the the user base and community that's mutually beneficial.
For example, any interested Company can organize Webinar. It should be helpful enough for Community to click and topic commercially neutral enough for StackStorm to help promoting it. We promote it via Email Newsletter, Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn. People that followed to your webinar landing page and registered for the webinar event are your potential clients.
It could be used by the professional services companies outside of the TSC and StackStorm Partners. StackStorm will request $ Community Bridge donation in the exchange of promoting the Webinar via Email Newsletter and do more like spending % of the donated $ to to advertize the Webinar via LinkedIn and Twitter AD. This will help attracting new StackStorm Community users as well as advertizing both Webinar & StackStorm.

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I'm sure there are many more creative ways for mutual benefit in an absolutely neutral healthy way that will affect StackStorm community in a good sense and help the project growth.

[m4dcoder]

There should be some discussion here somewhere about resource commitment and accountability in terms of software release. It may be hard to admit, but in current state (i.e. v3.3.0 release), the team has a failing grade on software engineering and release. v3.3.0 is late (I guess technically this is not late because there's no schedule and commitment to a date for release and this just keeps pushing), unaddressed gaps (i.e. st2web security vulnerabilities), and missing features (i.e. st2flow integration). Each companies listed in the partners page need to pull their own weight to ensure the project, community, and customers are successful.