If I am not mistaken, WGs predate sub-projects, so the confusion on reconciling the two is not surprising.
my understanding was that working groups spanned sigs as they are attempting to drive discussion, design, and development roadmaps for a topic area across sigs. once a clear technical approach is identified among the relevant sigs for a topic area, execution of that code should be managed within the proper sigs and subprojects. as an example, in wg-resource-mgmt, we wanted to support cpu scheduling. in the beginning, it was not clear if this was the domain of sig-scheduling or sig-node. the wg reached a design consensus that kept the concept in the domain of sig-node and implementation of the feature in the kubelet subproject. the present items under discussion in that work group (device plugin monitoring and metadata around resource apis) are following a similar pattern across sig-instrumentation, sig-scheduling, and sig-node.
the major difference i see which is a working group is a forum to resolve cross sig design issues.
>the difference between working groups and sigs
the governance says "is short lived or spans multiple sigs". this thread is implying a desire to make it "is short lived and spans multiple sigs". either approach is fine to me. this was a topic of recent discussion in wg-resource-mgmt. in my opinion, there are still technical topics in that wg that need closure around device plugins and resource apis that span multiple sigs. once closure on design approach is achieved, execution can happen in the owning sig/sub-project (i.e. sig-node, sig-instrumentation, sig-scheduling). it is neither my intent or desire to have the wg run forever, but i tend to agree with Quinton that working groups that no longer serve the sponsoring sigs well should just become inactive but its a sig decision.
>what should be working groups vs unofficial groups
i think a working group should have sponsorship from more than one sig and track a topic area that is an accepted part of the core project roadmap.
Thanks,
Derek