Open Stack

On 11 April 2017 at 09:58, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:
> Matt Riedemann wrote:
>> Lots of projects have alternating meeting times to accommodate
>> contributors in different time zones, especially Europe and Asia.
>>
>> The weekly TC meeting, however, does not.
>>
>> I have to assume this has come up before and if so, why hasn't the TC
>> adopted an alternating meeting schedule?
>>
>> For example, it's 4am in Beijing when the TC meeting happens. It's
>> already hard to get people from Asia into leadership roles within
>> projects and especially across the community, in large part because of
>> the timezone barrier.
>>
>> How will the TC grow a diverse membership if it's not even held, at
>> least every other week, in a timezone where the other half of the world
>> can attend?
>
> The current meeting time is more a consequence of the current membership
> composition than a hard rule. There is, however (as you point out) much
> chicken-and-egg effect at play here -- it's easier to get involved in
> the TC if you can regularly attend meetings, so we can't really wait
> until someone is elected to change the time.

+1 on the chicken-and-egg problem here.

If elected I plan on not attending the meetings, to help with this, please see:
https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/election/tree/candidates/pike/TC/johnthetubaguy.txt

> Alternating meeting times would certainly improve the situation, but I'm
> not sure they are the best solution. Personally I would rather try to
> decrease our dependency on meetings.

+1 this.

I think finding better ways of working that don't need synchronous
meetings that naturally exclude someone is the way forward here. We
have the tooling for most of this already, we just need to find better
patterns to keep making progress.

IRC meeting also have lots of the issues documented as mentioned on
this thread. Been working with the SWG group to bring ideas together
here:
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/441923/

Thanks,
johnthetubaguy