No Ingo, this is incorrect and that’s one relevant point of my criticism.
The discussion about the evaluation of this topic from the TSC started a few months ago and wasn’t public. I presented this in an unrecorded, private and direct manner to the TSC as per their request and there were no comments nor questions at the time, but many just afterwards, the moment I left the room. It was only due to some frustrated TSC members, who disagree with the current community-unfair approach, that I got to know about some of these comments.
Some of these comments were really unacceptable. This confidentiality is really firing back on the community for relevant decisions. This is an open community and TSC members should stand behind their words and organizations with transparency. Note I’m not against confidential information being shared, but if of relevance for a decision should be made public. This is the least an open community should demand in my view.
For example, in this particular case, in these private (“confidential”) conversations while evaluating REP-2014, the “authors of the REP were criticized” as not representative enough. Specially it was pointed out that other than myself, including your yourself Ingo (@Ingo_Lutkebohle) were “added to sell this better”. But both you and I @Ingo_Lutkebohle know that you yourself asked me to be listed as an author, and I accepted because besides the feedback you exchanged for REP-2014 privately, we’re all very well aware of your support and contributions to the tracing and benchmarking fields. Note this situation would’ve been very easy to address if made transparently, but not.
Another example issue in these confidential discussions was the criticism that “It does not include other alternatives”. It was requested months ago for REP-2014 to be more inclusive, so we went ahead modifying the language and incorporated ros2_benchmark (originally contributed by NVIDIA) into REP-2014. Of course the TSC member who made again this remark is unformed and would’ve benefited from a public discussion.
The fact that there’s no historic transparency (with the community) about the TSC in-take and application process, or that some companies enter through the back-door while others have to wait for months for a private resolution are yet again reasons why this confidentiality is against the interest of the ROS community. Sure we see someone important in the minutes from time to time, but what about the 10+ startups that keep applying and are neglected stealthily despite their contributions? And please don’t bring up community representatives here, TSC rejected changing them when pointed out their lack of participation. There’s even one of them who is not showing up. The last batch of applicants were of real quality and I would’ve taken them all to balance the corporates in the TSC today. We are past the early days of industry engagement. We need a community centric governance.
I’m worried about the current leadership, I don’t believe it works, and I believe it needs to change towards a community-centric establishment wherein topics like the documentation, the ROS fragmentation and/or crucial aspects of the technology are treated more, and politics left aside for the market to decide.
And again, an Informational REP is meant to lead the way, because consensus takes time, and iterations. That’s why this path was selected. REPs can always be updated or discarded afterwards.
This decision (a rejection) is a mistake that we all will suffer. TSC voted 3/12 against standardizing a benchmarking approach in ROS 2. They did so despite 10+ implementations (some listed here) of such a thing existing. And more to come!
Everyone should note how confusing it is that not even the TSC wants clarity in how measurements shall be performed and compared. This situation presented a big issue in other community (for example the Machine Learning community). If each one of us comes up with its own way of measuring things in ROS 2 (as we know happened in the so called “DDS wars” ) it’ll be very hard to accept anyone’s claims of performance.