[openstack-dev] [all] [ptl] Troubleshooting cross-project communications

John Garbutt john at johngarbutt.com
Fri Sep 18 09:39:06 UTC 2015


On 18 September 2015 at 00:50, Mike Perez <thingee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16:16 Sep 16, Thierry Carrez wrote:
>> Anne Gentle wrote:
>> > [...]
>> > What are some of the problems with each layer?
>> >
>> > 1. weekly meeting: time zones, global reach, size of cross-project
>> > concerns due to multiple projects being affected, another meeting for
>> > PTLs to attend and pay attention to
>>
>> A lot of PTLs (or liaisons/lieutenants) skip the meeting, or will only
>> attend when they have something to ask. Their time is precious and most
>> of the time the meeting is not relevant for them, so why bother ? You
>> have a few usual suspects attending all of them, but those people are
>> cross-project-aware already so those are not the people that would
>> benefit the most from the meeting.
>>
>> This partial attendance makes the meeting completely useless as a way to
>> disseminate information. It makes the meeting mostly useless as a way to
>> get general approval on cross-project specs.
>>
>> The meeting still is very useful IMHO to have more direct discussions on
>> hot topics. So a ML discussion is flagged for direct discussion on IRC
>> and we have a time slot already booked for that.
>
> Content for the cross project meeting are usually:
>
> * Not ready for decisions.
> * Lack solutions.
>
> A proposal in steps of how cross project ideas start, to something ready for
> the cross project IRC meeting, then the TC:
>
> 1) An idea starts from either or both:
>    a) Mailing list discussion.
>    b) A patch to a single project (until it's flagged that this patch could be
>       benefical to other projects)
> 2) OpenStack Spec is proposed - discussions happen in gerrit from here on out.
>    Not on the mailing list. Keep encouraging discussions back to gerrit to keep
>    everything in one place in order to avoid confusion with having to fish
>    for some random discussion elsewhere.
> 3) Once enough consensus happens an agenda item is posted cross project IRC
>    meeting.
> 4) Final discussions happen in the meeting. If consensus is still met by
>    interested parties who attend, it moves to TC.  If there is a lack of
>    consensus it goes back to gerrit and repeat.

+1

That totally seems worth a try.

Its extra process, but that should help drive the right conversations,
in more efficient way.

Thanks,
johnthetubaguy

> With this process, we should have less meetings. Less meetings is:
>
> * Awesome
> * Makes this meeting more meaningful when it happens because decisions are
>   potentially going to be agreed and passed to the TC!
>
> If a cross project spec is not getting attention, don't post it to the list for
> attention. We get enough email and it'll probably be lost. Instead, let the
> product working group recognize this and reach out to the projects that this
> spec would benefit, to bring meaningful attention to the spec.
>
> For vertical alignment, interaction like IRC is not necessary. A very brief,
> bullet point of collected information from projects that have anything
> interesting is given in a weekly digest email to the list If anyone has
> questions or wants more information, they can use their own time to ask that
> project team.
>
> Potentially, if we kept everything to the spec on gerrit, and had the product
> working group bringing needed attention to specs, we could eliminate the cross
> project meeting.



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