Open Stack

Hi everyone,

There has been a bit of tension lately around creating IRC meetings.
I've been busy[1] cleaning up unused slots and defragmenting biweekly
ones to open up possibilities, but truth is, even with those changes
approved, there will still be a number of time slots that are full:

Tuesday 14utc -- only biweekly available
Tuesday 16utc -- full
Wednesday 15utc -- only biweekly available
Wednesday 16utc -- full
Thursday 14utc -- only biweekly available
Thursday 17utc -- only biweekly available

[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/topic:dec2016-cleanup

Historically, we maintained a limited number of meeting rooms in order
to encourage teams to spread around and limit conflicts. This worked for
a time, but those days I feel like team members don't have that much
flexibility in picking a time that works for everyone. If the miracle
slot that works for everyone is not available on the calendar, they tend
to move the meeting elsewhere (private IRC channel, Slack, Hangouts)
rather than change time to use a less-busy slot.

So I'm now wondering how much that artificial scarcity policy is hurting
us more than it helps us. I'm still convinced it's very valuable to have
a number of "meetings rooms" that you can lurk in and be available for
pings, without having to join hundreds of channels where meetings might
happen. But I'm not sure anymore that maintaining an artificial scarcity
is helpful in limiting conflicts, and I can definitely see that it
pushes some meetings away from the meeting channels, defeating their
main purpose.

TL;DR:
- is it time for us to add #openstack-meeting-5 ?
- should we more proactively add meeting channels in the future ?

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)