LT Meeting Notes 2021‐07‐14

Meeting date: 2021/07/14

Zeek Leadership Team Members

(bold indicates attendance)

Aashish Sharma, Lawrence Berkeley Lab
Amber Graner, Corelight (Community Seat, non-voting)
Fatema Bannat Wala, ESnet
Johanna Amann, ICSI/Corelight/Berkeley Lab (chair)
Keith Lehigh, Indiana University
Nick Turley, Brigham Young University
Robin Sommer, Corelight (Technical Lead Seat)
Seth Hall, Corelight
Vern Paxson, Corelight & University of California at Berkeley (Founder Seat)

Project updates:

The LT is currently exploring the best way to lower project overhead rates. Johanna gave a short update of discussions around this topic – we will continue this conversation in the future.

Subproject updates:

Testing (Aashish):
- Testing of 4.1 beta has started.
- Small problems encountered with Zeek core dumping; tickets have been created for them
- For the future, the testing group should figure out how to give more helpful information than “here is a coredump”. Perhaps make ASAN builds a requirement for group members.
- Generally - promising start; Zeek 4.1 will be tested much better than Zeek 4.0.
Training (Fatema):
- The group transitioned to fully focusing on generating content for Zeek Week, instead of working on policy.
- Changed to bi-weekly meetings.
- Deadline for content creation is end of August
- Content-creation subgroup will meet separately until end of August; will merge back into the larger group at the end of August Content creation subgroup will meet for the first time this week.
- One of the goals is to run the content that is created for Zeek Week already through the Zeek approved training framework. So far, the training framework has not been approved by the LT – this will also still need to happen.

Zeek Week:

We are talking to people about sponsorships and training slots.
Amber will send personalized notes to past speakers, to get them to apply as speakers for this year.
Everything else is on track - we are currently reaching out to keynote speakers, registration is open, and we are in conversation with people who are interested in sponsorships and training.

Community membership

One of the goals of the Zeek Leadership team is to determine which structures we should establish to allow good community participation and feedback, including elections that are community-driven. In this meeting we started the exploration process around this topic.
Johanna gave an overview of the community structures and election systems of the Debian, Ubuntu, PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, Python, and Rust. Short conclusion: there is much more diversity than expected; most projects maintain tight control of their main decision-making bodies.
We will start reaching out to people in these and potentially other communities to ask what works and what does not work well in them.