Zeek LT Meeting notes 2023-11-30

Date of Meeting: 2023/11/30

Zeek Leadership Team Members

(bold indicates attendance)

  • Aashish Sharma, Lawrence Berkeley Lab
  • Christian Kreibich, Corelight (Technical Lead Seat)
  • Fatema Bannat Wala, ESnet
  • Johanna Amann, Corelight (Chair)
  • Keith Lehigh, Indiana University
  • Kelley Misata, Corelight (Community Seat, non-voting)
  • Robin Sommer, Corelight
  • Seth Grover, Idaho National Lab
  • Vern Paxson, Corelight & University of California at Berkeley (Founder Seat)

Minutes

The Zeek LT spent about half of this meeting discussing events for the next calendar year, specifically focusing on Zeek week.

During the discussion, a majority of the LT members expressed a desire to have an in-person US-based Zeek Week event in 2024. It, however, is currently unclear to us what kind of interest there is in this kind of event, and what kind of attendance we could expect. Having this kind of information is important to try to figure out potential venues.

The LT also discussed the possibility of moving back to a smaller event – potentially hosted by academic institutions. This should help keep the event costs more controllable.

Interlude: The LT is interested to know how helpful these notes are to the community. It requires non-negligible work for us to create these notes. If you are reading the notes – please click this link which just is a simple counter to let us gauge the interest in these notes. We would be even happier about a comment, or direct feedback to lt@zeek.org.

As next steps, we will poll the community to gauge interest (survey results here).

The second part of the meeting was used to discuss the role of the Zeek Team. The role of the Zeek Team is defined in our wiki. Traditionally, this has been a group of people who are actively contributing to the Zeek community in some way; most contributions were technical in nature, but there were also people with documentation tasks, etc.

In recent years, the focus of the Zeek Team has shifted a bit. Technical contributions now originate nearly exclusively from Corelight, and the Zeek Team no longer has a well-defined role as it used to in the past.

During the meeting, we discussed what the role of the Zeek Team should be – and if there is a way to revitalize the activity of the Zeek Team in the project. As part of this process, we are going to ask the members of the Zeek Team what they think the role should be that the Team fills in the project. LT members also brought up the idea that we should more clearly articulate needs that the project has to the Team – in the hope that someone will take up projects and responsibilities that are currently not filled. Generally, there was a desire to make the Zeek Team a larger and stronger group.

If you have any input about these topics – as always, please feel free to reach out to us – either here, or via email to lt@zeek.org.