Open Stack

Hi,

I think it would be good if we came up with some general guidelines wrt the processes by which decisions are made. By ³decisions², I mean decisions that we, as a community, will try to abide by ?

I have noticed in the past, that discussions in the mailing list (ML) sometimes peter out without a conclusion or decision. The ML seems to be a decent forum for discussion but not for decision making. At least, that¹s my impression so far.

The (formal?) decision-making mechanisms we have are:
- voting at our weekly ironic meeting. (When there is a vote, one can see who voted for what.)
- In summit design sessions
- in mid-cycles
- via spec or code patches. if someone asks for more people to voice their opinion
- anything else?

 We also tend to get consensus/agreement on IRC (if there are enough people present, where ³enough² typically means some number of core reviewers voicing their opinion).

I have a few concerns about the above. The ones that come to mind right now:
- I would like it to be possible to make decisions without everyone being present at the same time. Or if that isn¹t possible/do-able right now, at least let¹s make it clearer what a process might be, with some caveat for people-who-couldn¹t-attend to disagree later?
- consensus/agreement on IRC is nice, but I think it needs to move beyond that to being recorded somewhere. (I think we are doing this via comments in patches and other means but I don¹t know for sure.)

The reason I am bringing it up now (yes, the truth comes out) is because I asked a question on the mailing list on Monday [1] and it is now Thursday and maybe I am impatient ? I was about to reply to some of the comments and started to wonder whether it was worth replying or maybe it would be more effective (with respect to gathering the most feedback in the shortest amount of time) to move the discussion to our weekly meeting and hopefully have a decision then. (And the reason I even brought up that question was because I was reviewing someone¹s patch and it seemed like a good idea to try to unblock that patch instead of letting it languish there until someone else did something about it. But I digressŠ ?)

So what do folks think? Should a process for not-critical-or-time-sensitive-issues be e.g.: 
- bring it up for discussion in the mailing list
- after some elapsed amount of time (how long?) and/or petering out of replies, bring it up in some meeting for a decision?

--ruby

[1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-May/095090.html