Document the JSON Schema work the TSC is performing for strategic purposes

[jviotti]

The key topic in today's Open Community Working Meeting has been around the constraints that the JSON Schema organisation has at the moment (with no maintainers working full time on it like before) and the various things we have going on that we might not be able to invest proper time on. We had many initiatives and ideas from where we had more resources that realistically will not happen any time soon, and we probably have to be honest about that:

A suggestion in the call was:

• Can we take some time to zoom out and document what each of us is working on related to JSON Schema on volunteering efforts?
• By seeing everything in one place, try to strategise (and potentially make some hard decisions) on whether the volunteering work happening right now is realistic or not, or we should more clearly start saying no to some things
• As a byproduct of the above, potentially do an org/repo cleanup to close down things we will not pursue anymore and/or aggressively simplifying certain things that have too much of a maintainability overhead
• Finally, try to come up with a basic/minimal plan on how we can use the limited resources we have to push JSON Schema forward, potentially focusing on the highest return of investment. This might mean just going around closing lots of issues, removing code from i.e. the website, archiving some repos, etc. Whatever helps bringing in focus and simplicity given our current resources

cc @json-schema-org/tsc

[jviotti]

For example, in my case, just to get the ball rolling:

• I'm investing a ton on time trying to educate people on JSON Schema. Including learnjsonschema.com and the premium video course I'm shooting right now.
• I'm investing a ton of time trying to build better basic general purpose tooling for working with JSON Schema, like my JSON Schema CLI
• I'm investing time on the side to try to get people to write case studies on the blog and help them out along the way
• I'm investing some time on GSoC on projects that I think will help with some of JSON Schemas's core problems: i.e. education and basic tooling
• I'm investing some time trying to help out organising the JSON Schema conference

I'm feeling good with all of the above and not feeling overwhelmed. That said, I am pretty much working full time on JSON Schema stuff, so it doesn't feel like volunteering and I do it all within my normal working hours.

I guess my question to all is: what is taking most of your volunteering time and are you feeling overwhelmed by it? And if so, can we just stop it or find very clever ways of doing the same with 1/10 of the time investment?

Other than that, just thinking out loud on other things I see happening in the community/ecosystem (which might be my totally wrong biased view of it and please correct me if I'm wrong):

• The official website and related projects seem to be taking quite some time from @benjagm. Maybe there are ways to aggressively simplify them, so that they don't take much burden and a single volunteer can just run them without problems? I think the fact that the website is React.js doesn't help (feels super complex to me), but I agree it will be super hard to change it now
• The stable spec seems definitely a big thing to prioritise with the resources we have. Maybe offering some small grants to people like @gregsdennis and @jdesrosiers working on it out of the OpenCollective can help push this forward? Suggested by @benjagm too
• More sponsors could help. It would be nice to do a nice push to get more and bigger companies to financially support the project so we can financially support as much work as possible. This was a key one suggested by @benjagm

[gregsdennis]

My focus is the next specification release. Going is slow because we require reviews (which also come from people who don't have time) and a minimum 2w open time for (most) PRs. I'm not arguing that we should abandon those; just stating for visibility.

At the moment, the computer I use to work on all of this is under repair, so I haven't had the ability to pursue this for the past week or so.

As far as a repo cleanse, I did that almost a year ago. All issues should be properly labeled and put into projects/milestones as necessary.

[Julian]

In brief in terms of "strategic" stuff -- I'm basically in "maintenance" mode for Bowtie, which means responding to some great contributors who've sent PRs the past few weeks, but I have extremely little time at this point to do anything net-new (unless at some point I raise some funding for it).

[jviotti]

@Julian You are also doing some maintenance on the test suite too as far as I could see, right?

[Julian]

A few weeks ago yeah, which also came out of some work a contributor sent to my implementation.

[jdesrosiers]

My primary objective is still the language server work, but I'm blocked on that directly at the moment. There's a core component of my JSON Schema implementation that I want to refactor to make things easier for linting and a few other things. However, that means a new major version change and I don't want to do that without also incorporating a few other breaking changes that I've been wanting to make. So, right now, I'm trying to get through that as fast as I can so I can get back to the language server, but that's progress has been very slow.

My secondary objective is supporting Greg on the new spec work.

I'm now also doing GSoC support. Developing a qualification task and now reviewing submissions has definitely been taking up a lot of time recently.

I'm at more than full capacity and trying not to get involved in anything else.