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LT Meeting Notes 2021‐10‐20

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Johanna edited this page Nov 10, 2021 · 2 revisions

Meeting date: 2021/10/20

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, Zeek merge-master)
  • Keith Lehigh, Indiana University
  • Nick Turley, Brigham Young University
  • Robin Sommer, Corelight (Technical Lead Seat, Zeek merge-master)
  • Seth Hall, Corelight (Zeek merge-master)
  • Vern Paxson, Corelight & University of California at Berkeley (Founder Seat)

Minutes

Project updates

  • We pinged the law firm about the status of the surprise legal bill we got (see the 2021-09-08 meeting notes for more detail). They are working on this internally; apart from that there are no updates.

Training subgroup

  • The training subgroup will create a new webpage that will contain a list of the trainings that were approved for Zeek Week. We are hoping to provide more training opportunities within the next few months for the people that were unable to get a training slot at Zeek Week.
  • Amber is reaching out to other people that are providing Zeek training, to see if they want to submit it to the Zeek-approved training program.

Zeek Week recap

  • Overall, Zeek week was a big success. We hit the registration targets that we set ourselves. We got significantly more participants than last year.
  • There were only two small hiccups. One of the calendar invites contained a default google-meet link that we forgot to remove. On day two, Amber dropped off a few times due to problems with her machine.
  • The 20-minute talks were well received.
  • A few people complained about the complexity of the training. The LT discussed this feedback at length:
    • Our problem is that we need to know the audience. With zero programming background, even in the intro, it is difficult to get past the first exercise. Similarly, if you have no idea of networking and protocols, you cannot really get far after the intro.
    • A big problem is that we have no clue who the people attending are and what their experience level is. In the past, we tried to get information about training participants beforehand – however attendees were reluctant to provide the necessary details.
    • Perhaps we should break the training into two parts: scripting basics and advanced scripting - however this also will not really remedy the situation.
  • With remote training it is also difficult to adjust the content during the training because there is no effective feedback loop - you do not see if people are struggling. So - some of this might improve by going back to in-person training.
  • The LT discussed techniques that could potentially be used to improve this situation with remote training, such as structuring material around checkpoints where attendees answer technical questions via a poll enabling the instructors to see how well a point has been understood

Election Process for the 2022 and future elections

  • The 2020 election was the first time that the Zeek LT constituted itself using the current election process. Before performing the next elections (which will happen around August 2022), the Zeek LT discussed our experiences with the election format, and if we want to make any changes to it, for example by opening it up to a larger community.
  • The Zeek LT agreed that, for the foreseeable future, we should keep the election process as it is currently documented in the Zeek Project Leadership Team Process: community members can propose themselves and the current LT will vote on the members of the next LT. The LT considered opening this process up for broader community voting. However, the LT’s view is that at the current time there is not yet a sufficient number of community-led groups to have a meaningful broader voting process. A future LT can revisit this topic, once there are more active members in community-led groups.
  • As this change constitutes a non-trivial change to the Zeek Leadership team process, as described in the process document, we will communicate this change to the community and solicit feedback.
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