Cross-Community Collaboration Process

Owned by djhunt
Last updated: Feb 26, 2020 by Prakash Ramchandran
4 min read

Goal: recommend an approach for cross-community (external) collaboration

Members

@Lingli Deng

@Oguzhan Ceylan (to be confirmed)

 @Hui Deng

@Magnus Buhrgard

@Prakash Ramchandran  (for OSF/Open Infrastructure collaborations)

I.        Problem description

As an open source community for operator network technology innovation, LFN needs to establish and maintain close cooperative relationships with other industry organizations, especially standard-setting organizations.

However, the actual situation is that many standards organizations do not know how to establish direct contact or technical cooperation with the technical teams of LFN projects. On the other hand, the TSC project responsible for technical research and development is not familiar with the communication needs and collaboration expectations of external organizations and hence the processing methods are relatively random and relatively separated from their own release cadence, resulting in slow un-doing in peer-to-peer communication and difficulty to guarantee actual results.

This is not a problem for a single project or any specific organization, but a problem that needs to be solved together at the cross-project organization level of the LFN.

II.     Problem analysis

The core conflict is caused by the different working models and focus of standards organizations and open source communities: standards organizations are task-driven with documents as the core, while open source communities are contribution-driven with code as the core.

Hence the key to solving the problem of cross-organizational collaboration is to clarify common technical points for collaboration, formulate special personnel for corresponding communication, collaborate with each other's technical release cadence, and timely track and feedback related task execution status.

In other words, the core is providing answers to who? what? how?

III. Proposed solution

To this end, we propose to establish an organization and management process for internal and external cross-organizational collaboration at TAC. The goal is to promote both:

  • Collaboration: identify common people and common goals; and

  • Openness: Establish channels for information sharing and resource identification.

by addressing the following gaps:

  • Establish Current state. Survey the communities to understand:

    • What touchpoints the projects have with external SDOs and open source communities

    • Understand where there might be “outstanding” requests from external orgs or where we have not responded

    • Identify possible gaps in which orgs we are working with

    • NEEDED: Representative from each project to provide this input

  •  Make recommendations on external community interaction

    • Recommend that each project have identified contact(s) for external communities. Will be published on LFN-wide wiki.

    • Each Project TSC owns strategy for which groups they want to work with

    • Each Project TSC responsible to respond to communications initiated

    • TAC can provide a focal point for external projects to route them to proper project focal point.

    • LFN can provide a centralized publishing point for more formalized communications or “standards”

IV.  Follow-up plan

  • 2020/02-TAC draft process proposal

  • 2020/03- Approved by TAC, launch internal EUAG / TSC and external collaboration needs input survey, clarify collaboration tasks and partners

  • 2020/04- During ONES, organize external collaboration workshop, clarify collaboration teams and delivery plans

  • 2020/05-Summary of requirements and input to each TSC for collaborative release planning

  • 2020/06-Summary of collaborative planning and output to various external organizations for collaborative information sharing

  • 2020/09-Progress evaluation, and output to GB, various TSC and external organizations as a reference for work progress evaluation

  • 2020/11-Complete the evaluation and output to GB and each TSC as a reference for the phased summary and iterative planning of collaborative R & D work

V.     Draft process

  1. TAC is responsible for formulating a clear division of labor:

    1. TAC serves as the focal point for the management mechanism, and TSC serves as the focal point for the technical collaboration.

    2. TAC identifies common process and system requirements across projects and acts as a common external link to external organizations.

  2. TAC serves as an internal and external information sharing channel for cross-organizational collaboration needs, undertaking teams and current status by

    1. Incoming collaboration request processing

      1. Responsible for publicly maintaining all incoming collaboration requests, processing status, and interface information from external organizations (e.g. SDO, open source, etc.)

      2. Responsible for identifying the internal technical interface organization of the external collaboration request for which the technical project has not been clearly specified, forward it to the corresponding one or more TSC interface persons, and update the request processing status and corresponding team information

      3. Responsible for updating request processing status and planned response time based on feedback from TSC interface person

    2. Outgoing collaboration request processing

      1. Responsible for maintaining all outgoing collaboration requests from internal organizations (e.g. EUAG, GB, TSC, etc.)

      2. Responsible for identifying external collaboration requests that have not been clearly formulated by external technical organizations, and send them to the corresponding external organizations under the name of LFN, and update the request processing status and corresponding external liaison team information based on their feedback

    3. Regularly solicit demand input and strategic guidance from GB and EUAG

    4. Organize collaborative workshops between LFN and other external organizations as needed, and

    5. Regularly solicit work progress and implementation feedback from TSC

  3. TSC as the entity responsible for cross-organizational collaboration request confirmation, work planning, completion and actual technical work

    1. Designate a special person to be responsible for the unified processing of collaboration requests from TAC / external organizations

    2. Confirm cooperation intentions and designate specific technical interface persons, implement work plans, and feedback implementation status

VI.  Call for action

Set up an interest group to complete the draft process and set goals at the end of February. Members are NOT limited to TAC representatives.

Everyone is welcome to join us or recommend the right people/organizations/issues to us.