Responsiveness of SIG Chairs needs improvement

[guineveresaenger]

Hi Kubies,

I am the 1.17 Release Team Lead and I'm here to tell you that my team has been amazing throughout the release. But future release teams need your help!

We have had a really difficult time getting a response from some SIG-chairs on important release related issues via the SIG Chairs' mailing list. Almost every release team lead has had to go hunt down individuals via Slack, and sometimes even Twitter(!) DM to get a response.

Conferring with previous release leads, SIG-Architecture, and SIG-contributor-experience, this has been a problem for a while.

The responsibility for communication should be shared, and currently, it is not.

This communication lag delays releases and creates needless legwork for the Release Team and other inter-SIG efforts.

The following things are true to the best of my knowledge

• The SIG Chair mailing list is the canonical way of contacting the SIG chairs.
• It is the SIG Chairs' responsibility to read and respond in a timely matter to action items on the SIG chair mailing list.
• Being a Kubernetes SIG Chair is not only an honor and a duty, it is also beneficial, and in some cases intrinsically related to, a contributor's career. (Some folks are directly being paid by their employers to chair a SIG or Subproject.)

It is, therefore, my suggestion that there should be consequences for not responding to communications in the mailing list in a timely manner.

I welcome suggestions from the community. Here are some ideas for discussion:

• Chairs "ack" any item marked "ACTION REQUIRED" just so collaborators know the message reached you
• Any SIG that is not responding in a timely fashion will be automatically refused for exception requests during a release cycle
• Chairs that do not respond in a timely fashion will be removed as chairs. If you do not have the time, you should not do the job. It's a lot of leg work - perhaps give a more junior contributor a turn.

I really, really do not want to escalate this to Steering. I also want to express my 🎉 sincerest thanks 🎉 to all the SIG leads that have been responsive and helpful around project-wide efforts like the release process and the contributor summits. You exemplify what everyone should aspire to be.

/sig contributor-experience
/area community-management
/cc @justaugustus
/cc @geekygirldawn
/cc @parispittman
/cc @castrojo

[guineveresaenger]

/sig api-machinery
/sig apps
/sig architecture
/sig auth
/sig autoscaling
/sig cli
/sig cloud-provider
/sig cluster-lifecycle
/sig docs
/sig instrumentation
/sig multicluster
/sig network
/sig node
/sig onprem
/sig pm
/sig release
/sig scalability
/sig scheduling
/sig service-catalog
/sig storage
/sig testing
/sig ui
/sig usability
/sig windows