Open Stack

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 03:14:39PM +0100, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> > ## Cores are *NOT* special
> > 
> > At some point, for some reason that is unknown to me, this message
> > changed and the feeling of core's being some kind of superheros became
> > a thing. It's gotten far enough to the point that I've came to know
> > that some projects even have private (flagged with +s), password
> > protected, irc channels for core reviewers.
> 
> This is seriously disturbing.
> 
> If you're one of those core reviewers hanging out on a private channel,
> please contact me privately: I'd love to hear from you why we failed as
> a community at convincing you that an open channel is the place to be.
> 
> No public shaming, please: education first.

I've been thinking about these last few lines a bit, I'm not entirely
comfortable with the dynamic this sets up.

What primarily concerns me is the issue of community accountability. A core
feature of OpenStack's project & individual team governance is the idea
of democractic elections, where the individual contributors can vote in
people who they think will lead OpenStack in a positive way, or conversely
hold leadership to account by voting them out next time. The ability of
individuals contributors to exercise this freedom though, relies on the
voters being well informed about what is happening in the community.

If cases of bad community behaviour, such as use of passwd protected IRC
channels, are always primarily dealt with via further private communications,
then we are denying the voters the information they need to hold people to
account. I can understand the desire to avoid publically shaming people
right away, because the accusations may be false, or may be arising from a
simple mis-understanding, but at some point genuine issues like this need
to be public. Without this we make it difficult for contributors to make
an informed decision at future elections.

Right now, this thread has left me wondering whether there are still any
projects which are using password protected IRC channels, or whether they
have all been deleted, and whether I will be unwittingly voting for people
who supported their use in future openstack elections.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|