2022 Q1 Hyperledger FireFly

Created by Nickolaus John Guyer, last modified by Peter Somogyvari on May 03, 2022

Project Health

FireFly is doing great, and is expected to release v1.0.0 at the beginning of Q2. New community members are participating in discussions in Discord. The move to Discord has been a huge positive change for the FireFly community, and it is much more active than Rocket Chat ever was. New contributors also continue to make contributions to the project.

Required Information

  1. Have you switched from master to main in all your repos ? Yes.
  2. Have you implemented the Common Repository Structure in all your repos ? Yes.
  3. Has your project implemented these inclusive language changes listed below to your repo? You can optionally use the DCI Lint tool to make this a recurring action on your repo.  Yes.
  4. master → main
  5. slave → replicas
  6. blacklist → denylist
  7. whitelist → allowlist
  8. Have you added an Inclusive Language Statement to your project’s documentation and/or Wiki pages?  No.

Questions/Issues for the TSC

There are no issues at this time.

Releases

The full list of releases can be found at:  https://github.com/hyperledger/firefly/releases

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Discord is very active, and project maintainers are usually fairly prompt in answering questions there. Community calls are still happening every other week, though attendance has definitely declined, starting at the beginning of the year. Code activity is very high, as the team progresses toward the v1.0.0 release.

Current Plans

The v1.0.0 release is the next major release, though there may be several patch releases before then. For detailed progress on v1.0.0, please see the GitHub project board:  https://github.com/orgs/hyperledger/projects/4/views/3

Beyond v1.0.0, there are several other major features, for which development will begin immediately following v1.0.0:

  • Multiple ledger/blockchain support
  • Active-active High Availability for FireFly Core

Maintainer Diversity

New maintainers (since last report):

Contributor Diversity

Contributions in Q1 including code, documentation, or other contributions:

Active contributors from Kaleido: 10

Active contributors from other organizations: 3 

Additional Information

FireFly continues to make great progress, especially in technical enhancements. The community however, still needs to grow. We would love to see more users, contributors, and maintainers join the community. A very slow stream of new contributors wanting to get involved in the project continues to be a challenge. Those contributors gaining enough technical familiarity with the project, and being willing to take on the responsibilities of a maintainer poses an even larger challenge. These are obstacles to moving to a Graduated Project status. Any assistance that the Hyperledger Foundation can provide in overcoming these challenges would be appreciated.

Reviewed By

Submission date

15-Mar-2022

Comments:

Under the "Maintainer Diversity" section, you list two new maintainers (congratulations) who are both from Kaleido. Are there currently any maintainers who are not from Kaleido?

You also mention that you are having a hard time getting people to take on the responsibilities of a maintainer in the "Additional Information". What is the typical reason for this? Do you have someone (maybe a sponsoring maintainer) who is helping to mentor new contributors to becoming a maintainer?

Posted by tkuhrt at Mar 15, 2022 20:17

Thanks Tracy. Right now all of the maintainers are from Kaleido.

" Do you have someone (maybe a sponsoring maintainer) who is helping to mentor new contributors to becoming a maintainer?"

Part of my role is connecting with other developers and helping them get plugged into the project. I regularly make myself available to chat over Discord or Zoom if someone is interested in contributing and needs guidance on where to start.

We've had quite a few contributions from people participating in hackathons, or students who want to make open source contributions to build their resume and get experience. We've had a couple contributions from someone at another organization that is using FireFly for their business. But we haven't seen any  consistent contributions over a period of time from anyone outside the maintainers. You ask wh"at the typical reason for this is, and I wish I knew. I could speculate, but it would just be speculation.

Maybe it's awareness of the project? When we do hackathons or meetups, everyone seems really excited about FireFly, but only a small number follow through and actually make a contribution.

Maybe it's that it feels too challenging for contributors to take on larger, more complicated tasks like architectural changes? This is a tough one because the project is moving so quickly right now.

Thanks for following up on this though, and I'd love to continue the dialog about how to grow the community and get more maintainers and contributors.

Posted by nguyer at Mar 15, 2022 21:08

Nickolaus John Guyer – I think part of the issue with finding new maintainers is that it takes time.  People don't show up with all the knowledge and experience they would need to become a maintainer but they can get there.  I'm encouraged to see that there is a stream of new contributors wanting to get involved, so my recommendation is to keep doing what you've been doing and to also look at providing resources for people to get beyond their first contribution.  Like we talked about recently, one or more in depth technical workshops, for instance, can help people get more of that experience.

And I agree that it is a challenge for someone new to take on a big complicated task especially when the project is moving quickly.  One thing to do here is make sure there are plenty of less complicated tasks newer people can take.  I scanned through the FireFly issues list and saw just two issues marked as a good first issue .  Perhaps there are others that I didn't see, but in general having a longer list of initial tasks for those new people showing up is a good practice.

Posted by davidwboswell at Mar 15, 2022 21:49

You may already be doing this, but the other question that comes to mind is how much of the work is being done in the open. That is, how much is done in the day-to-day interactions within Kaleido vs. ensuring that the discussions and designs are done in the open where anyone can contribute and participate? Ideally, people will be able to see the conversations that are ongoing related to particular feature development and provide thoughts on designs in an effort to ensure that the knowledge is open. This will allow for people who may not be in the day-to-day to at least gain knowledge without having to depend on waiting for someone to come on line to answer questions or provide direction.

Posted by tkuhrt at Mar 15, 2022 21:56

I am assuming multiple features were developed in the previous quarter. These include features such as "Custom smart contract support" which was in progress in the last report. This feature specifically is a big encouragement for anybody to adopt FireFly as a framework to build their blockchain applications. I was curious because the current quarter activity says it was coding intensive period without mentioning the specifics.

Amazing work, looking forward to the v1.0.0 release, best of luck to the whole team.

Posted by arsulegai at Mar 16, 2022 09:37

Is there any production deployment of firefly ? To make people understand how firefly can be used ,people need case studies.  Releasing v1.0.0 and announcement of existing production deployment system built on Firefly.  I think proper marketing required how and who is using FireFly in production.

Best of luck for V1.0.0 , looking forward.

Posted by knagware9 at Mar 17, 2022 07:56

Thank you all for the helpful thoughts and feedback!

Kamlesh Nagware , your suggestion about production case studies is a good one. In fact, we have folks from both Synaptic Health Alliance and Riskstream Collaborative joining a panel to talk about this very thing in the FireFly 1.0 launch webinar. Hopefully highlighting this type of thing more will help build momentum for the project.

Posted by nguyer at Mar 31, 2022 15:15