Open Stack

There's a governance proposal in progress at
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/357260/ that I think is worth a
visit by anyone interested in the definition and evolution of
OpenStack's identity and the processes and guidelines used in OpenStack.

I'm assuming that not everyone regularly cruises the governance
project so this thing, which is pretty important, has probably not
been seen yet by many community members. It is full of many
assertions, some probably controversial, about what OpenStack is and
what we get up to.

At the moment a lot of the reviews are obsessing over the details and
interpretations of various phrases and paragraphs. This is in
preparation for a later presentation to the community that ought to
engender a long email thread where we will discuss it and try to ratify.
I fear that discussion will also obsess over the details.

The ordering here is backwards from a process that could be happening if
what we want is effective engagement and a useful outcome (one where we
agree). We should first have a conversation about the general principles
that are desired, then capture those into a document and only then
obsess over the details. The current process will inevitably privilege
the existing text and thus the bias of the authors[1].

I presume that the process that is happening was chosen to avoid too
much bikeshedding. The issue with that is that the work we need to
do is stepping back a bit and concerning ourselves not with the color of
the shed, but with whether it is for bikes, or even a shed. Last we
talked about it, it was a tent, but there's no consensus that that is
going well.

[1] I don't wish to indicate that there's anything wrong (or right!)
about the current text, simply that it is a presentation of a few
authors, including some written in the past, not a summary of an open
discussion in the present day.

-- 
Chris Dent               ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)        https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent