What?

The Technical Advisory Office will help projects under the Linux Foundation Networking solve problems they are dealing with using expertise of community members.

Why?

Projects under the LFN seem to be dealing with addressing similar challenges, yet there is little information sharing between the various projects. The issue is not unwillingness to share, but rather lack of information about the right counterparts in other projects who may posses the right knowledge.

The type of issues that tend be common to multiple projects are around:

• Projects infrastructure - build and test environments, tools, etc. 
• Stability, Security, Scalability, Performance (S3P).
• Data and Information modeling
• ...

Making the right connections between individuals and teams who work on similar problems in different projects could let some projects benefit from the work done in others. It would hopefully avoid parallel efforts in different projects and create synergies between projects. Having to address the similar problems more than once should encourage teams to document their efforts for the benefit of future projects.

How?

The Technical Advisory Office will focus on addressing issues that were already tackled by project teams under the LFN. Certainly not all challenges already have a solution in the community. In other cases a solution from project A may not be applicable to project B due to the use of different platforms, programming languages, deployment environment, etc. However our experience in the LFN community indicates that at least on the surface, some of the challenges faced by projects bare a certain similarity.

The role of the TAO should be strictly "Advisory". The intent is not to force projects to use the same methods and technologies, or to dictate a certain architecture. As such, it is proposed that the TAO will be driven by requests from the projects, and will not attempt to solicit cooperation where it was not explicitly requested by one of the projects.

The TAO main role is to facilitate the collaboration between projects, not necessarily play an active role in it. The facilitation should cover the following aspects:

• Identifying groups or individuals in LFN projects that addressed similar issues, or posses expertise in the domain in question.
• Create the necessary platform for collaboration - Wiki pages, Conference calls, Mailing list tags, etc.
• Drive the collaboration by making sure information is exchanged in a proper and timely manner, the right individuals are involved, communication is documented and decisions are being made.
• Make sure the process is documented for the benefit of future projects, especially the problem statement and proposed solution(s).
• Follow up on the implementation of the solution and if required re-initiate the collaboration. Repeat until a satisfactory solution has been reached.

Where?

• How should projects request assistance?
  • Direct email to a monitored alias

or

• • Tag on existing mailing list

or

• • Wiki post
• How to find the right expertise?
  • Start with the TAC members
  • Build a list SMEs
  • Post a request for assistance in mailing list(s) (which?)
• Where should we document the process and generated information?
  • LFN Wiki?
  • Other?

Open questions

1. What should we do if there is no expertise under the LFN? Should we avoid the issue? Find external expertise in other communities? Professional experts?
2. Should the TAO make proactive proposals for sharing solutions across projects? (E.g. if one project successfully dealt with security hardening, maybe the TOC should make sure other projects are aware?)
3. How to solicit requests? What should we do if there are too many? prioritize?