Open Stack

Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 01/16/2013 12:09 AM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
>> IMHO, the TC is a group of people charged with building a rough
>> consensus on cross-project topics.
> 
> I don't agree.
> 
> The technical committee should intervene as few as possible, and should
> be there only when there is a strong disagreement inside the project,
> and there's no other ways to decide. Obviously, when there's a
> possibility to find a consensus (which is always preferred), then we
> don't need the tech-ctte. It should only be the last resort, and best is
> to discuss things in IRC or in the devel list.
> 
> So it's not the role of a tech-ctte to build a consensus.

I partly disagree. The role of the committee is triple: it serves as an
ultimate oversight/appeals board for issues that can't be solved in any
other way, it build policies applying to the whole project, and it
decides which project should be part of our common integrated release.

In the first role, the idea is to come to a decision in an issue where
the other parts of our governance failed to come up with one. Since PTLs
rule on issues affecting their project, this is likely to be
cross-project issues, or cross-function issues. In the end, what's
important is to come up with a final decision, and here voting is key.

In the second role, the idea is to have a workgroup to come up with good
cross-project policies. That part of the work should strive to build
consensus, discuss the solution publicly on the ML and then adopt it.
Ideally this part of the work wouldn't require voting as we'd ideally
come up with a solution that's agreeable to everyone in the workgroup.

The third role is somewhat in between. Ideally we'd all agree, but we
still need to answer YES or NO in a reasonable timeframe, so voting
might be necessary at the end of the day.

> As well, contrary to what has been said, I would suggest that a PTL
> looses his rights to vote on an issue concerning his own project, to
> avoid conflicts of interest. Everyone in the tech-ctte should anyway be
> able to understand the issue. So the argument that the PTL of a given
> project knows better is IMO not a good one. People in the tech-ctte
> should all be knowledgeable and be able to take a good decision anyway.

In the first role, I'd tend to agree with that. If we need to decide
where there is a conflict between a specific project and our packagers
community, for example, giving one vote to that project PTL without
giving a vote to the packagers party sounds... unfair.

For all the other roles though, all projects are likely affected but we
still very much want their PTLs to participate in the discussion.

Regards,

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Chair, OpenStack Technical Committee