Matthias,

I only came across your email from June [1] today, which is sad, because if I had seen it earlier I would have encouraged others to reply to your reasonable questions.

I'm quoting your original text below, and hopefully this will kick the discussion into action.

who I am: I work as a operartions engineer at a data centre in Europe
and formerly I worked for several years as a development engineer in SDN
networking area.

Your project has caught my attention for its corageous mission. I am
strongly interested in bringing forward civic from a computing
technicial perspective and I see me fit to do so.

I haven't had any experience in working in linux collab projects yet and
there are quite many projects in linux collab. So to help me decide if
participating in your project is the right endeavor for me: please,
answer me a few questions, although those can seem a little blunt.

I think it is very wise for anyone considering participating in a community, to understand the agenda and scope before committing. So your questions are entirely reasonable. I'm not sure CIP yet has thorough answers, but I will try....

Is it at all imperative for you gathering together individuals to solve
technicial intricacies or is it rather a tightly financial sponsor
interests guided project, and therefore for the members of the sponsors?

CIP is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, with a small number of founder member organisations [2] who are in effect the sponsors. As you can see from [2] the emphasis is currently on companies rather than individuals.

Are extraneous forces really welcome?

I consider myself an extraneous force also, and am waiting to see what the answer is :-)

Our lack of response to your original email must have been a disappointing welcome for you, and I hope some other participants will respond to clarify properly.

To what level in software terms do you want to bring about innovations?
You are speaking abstractly about a platform and glue mechanisms. To
what extend? Down to the driver level?

Overall I think CIP is aiming more to increase confidence and reliability in relevant software, rather than bring about innovations. IMO it would be clearly unwise to put absolutely latest/unstable software into (for example) a nuclear power station before verifying its performance over a period of time. But I think we *need* to see some innovations in processes, and validation, and reproducibility, and long term maintenance of deep systems software - including all the way down to how driver level code is done.

Others may disagree of course - i hope they speak up! :)

Are there opportunities for individuals or is it rather meant to cheaply
tap into ressources? Can one ascend therein?

For CIP I must leave this to other members. However you may be interested a separate thread of discussions on another community list, about Trustable Software Engineering [2] which I think has some complementary and overlapping aims. For sure I can say that individual contributors are welcome there, and I'm hoping that the content will prove to be of interest to the CIP community also.

br
Paul


[1] http://lists.cip-project.org/pipermail/cip-dev/2016-June/000003.html
[2] https://www.cip-project.org/faq
[3] https://lists.veristac.io/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/trustable-software