As the ONOS community continues to grow it brings a challenge of how to coordinate a large group to make sure we’re all working toward a shared goal. One way to address this is to communicate clearly about our vision for ONOS and invite people to work together on completing specific parts of that vision.

This is where the brigade model comes in — the idea is to create small teams around specific features that we want to ship in upcoming versions of ONOS. This can help us connect with other people in the community who are excited about that feature and it gives that group a framework for working together.

Code for America has been successfully using brigades to build new tools that help with local civic issues all across the country. There are many best practices we can take from that experience to help us get moving quickly with this model in our community. If you’ve been involved in a Code for America brigade, we’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

Benefits of joining a Brigade

• Opportunity: Joining a brigade is a unique opportunity to work with the core engineering team and participate in work onsite at Menlo Park
• Recognition: The work of brigade members will be showcased widely with the community both online as well as at events, like at ONOS Build
• Experience: Taking part in a brigade is a great opportunity, especially for students, to get experience in network engineering and is a great stepping stone to possibly work at ON.Lab or other member organizations
• Acceleration: Helping a brigade deliver a feature will get work that you care about into an official ONOS release much more quickly than it would without the brigade's efforts.

Active Brigades

These are the currently active ONOS brigades:

• Build and Package Infrastructure 
  
• Deployments
• Dynamic configuration
• gRPC  
• GUI
• Northbound
• Orchestration
• Security & performance analysis  
  
• Teaching
  
• Virtualization

Getting Involved with a Brigade

If you're interested in the work of any of these brigades, please take a look at that brigade's wiki page to learn more about what is happening, what help is needed and how to get in touch with the team.

Roles, Recommendations and Requirements (draft section)

If you chose to take part in or lead a brigade, we have some best practices and recommendations for you.

Recommendations

David to summarize notes from the post-mortem discussion...

Mentors

Mentorship is vital in an open source community because so much information and knowledge is often not written down or documented.  For brigades where there are leads or members who do not have easy access to the ON.Lab offices in Menlo Park, mentorship is also crucial since you do not have the ability to easily interact with and ask questions of core team members based there.  Because of that, we encourage all brigades that are not lead by an ON.Lab staff member to have a mentor who can support them, answer questions and get them unstuck when they are blocked.  Mentors can be ON.Lab staff members, TST members, module owners or anyone else who has deep knowledge to share about the work the brigade is doing.

Product Owners

Bill to add information about the product owner role here...

Test Coverage

Suchitra to add information about the test coverage requirements and how the ON.Lab QA team will interact with brigades here...