Governance

There’s several term that will constantly appeared in Kubernetes, so I’d like to show the terms first.

SIGs

The Kubernetes project is organized primarily into Special Interest Groups, or SIGs. Each SIG is comprised of members from multiple companies and organizations, with a common purpose of advancing the project with respect to a specific topic, such as Networking or Documentation. Our goal is to enable a distributed decision structure and code ownership, as well as providing focused forums for getting work done, making decisions, and onboarding new contributors. Every identifiable subpart of the project (e.g., github org, repository, subdirectory, API, test, issue, PR) is intended to be owned by some SIG.

Working Groups

We need community rallying points to facilitate discussions/work regarding topics that are short-lived or that span multiple SIGs.

Working groups are primarily used to facilitate topics of discussion that are in scope for Kubernetes but that cross SIG lines. If a set of folks in the community want to get together and discuss a topic, they can do so without forming a Working Group.

User groups

Some topics have long term relevance to large groups of Kubernetes users, but do not have clear deliverables or ownership of parts of the Kubernetes code base. As such they are neither good fits for SIGs or Working Groups. An example of such a topic might be continuous delivery to Kubernetes.

Though their central goal is not a deliverable piece of work, as contributing members of the community user groups are expected to work with SIGs to either identify friction or usability issues that need to be addressed, or to provide or improve documentation in their area of expertise. However these activities are covered under general code contributions to the relevant SIGs (e.g. SIG Docs) rather than as part of the user group. These contributions are expected to be more incremental and ad-hoc versus the more targeted output of a user group.

Committees

Some topics, such as Security or Code of Conduct, require discretion. Whereas SIGs are voluntary groups which operate in the open and anyone can join, Committees do not have open membership and do not always operate in the open. The steering committee can form committees as needed, for bounded or unbounded duration. Membership of a committee is decided by the steering committee, however, all committee members must be community members. Like a SIG, a committee has a charter and a chair, and will report to the steering committee periodically, and to the community as makes sense, given the charter.

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