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Hi everyone,

For the PTG events we have a number of rooms available for 5 days, of
which we need to make the best usage. We also want to keep it simple and
productive, so we want to minimize room changes (allocating the same
room to the same group for one or more days).

For the first PTG in Atlanta, we split the week into two groups.
Monday-Tuesday for "horizontal" project team meetups (Infra, QA...) and
workgroups (API WG, Goals helprooms...), and Wednesday-Friday for
"vertical" project team meetups (Nova, Swift...). This kinda worked, but
the feedback we received called for more optimizations and reduced
conflicts.

In particular, some projects which have a lot of contributors overlap
(Storlets/Swift, or Manila/Cinder) were all considered "vertical" and
happened at the same time. Also horizontal team members ended up having
issues to attend workgroups, and had nowhere to go for the rest of the
week. Finally, on Monday-Tuesday the rooms that had the most success
were inter-project ones we didn't really anticipate (like the API WG),
while rooms with horizontal project team meetups were a bit
under-attended. While we have a lot of constraints, I think we can
optimize a bit better.

After giving it some thought, my current thinking is that we should
still split the week in two, but should move away from an arbitrary
horizontal/vertical split. My strawman proposal would be to split the
week between inter-project work (+ teams that rely mostly on liaisons in
other teams) on Monday-Tuesday, and team-specific work on Wednesday-Friday:

Example of Monday-Tuesday rooms:
Interop WG, Docs, QA, API WG, Packaging WG, Oslo, Goals helproom,
Infra/RelMgt/support teams helpdesk, TC/SWG room, VM&BM Working group...

Example of Wednesday-Thursday or Wednesday-Friday rooms:
Nova, Cinder, Neutron, Swift, TripleO, Kolla, Infra...

(NB: in this example infra team members end up being available in a
general support team helpdesk room in the first part of the week, and
having a regular team meetup on the second part of the week)

In summary, Monday-Tuesday would be mostly around themes, while
Wednesday-Friday would be mostly around teams. In addition to that,
teams that /prefer/ to run on Monday-Tuesday to avoid conflicting with
another project meetup (like Manila wanting to avoid conflicting with
Cinder, or Storlets wanting to avoid conflicting with Swift) could
*choose* to go for Monday-Tuesday instead of Wednesday-Friday.

It's a bit of a long shot (we'd still want to equilibrate both sides in
terms of room usage, so it's likely that the teams that are late to
decide to participate would be pushed on one side or the other), but I
think it's a good incremental change that could solve some of the issues
reported in the Atlanta week slicing, as well as generally make
inter-project coordination simpler.

If we adopt that format, we need to be pretty flexible in terms of what
is a "workgroup": to me, any inter-project work that would like to have
a one-day or two-day room should be able to get some.
Nova-{Cinder,Neutron,Ironic} discussions would for example happen in the
VM & BM working group room, but we can imagine others just like it.

Let me know what you think. Also feel free to propose alternate creative
ways to slice the space and time we'll have. We need to open
registration very soon (June 1st is the current target), and we'd like
to have a rough idea of the program before we do that (so that people
can report which days they will attend more accurately).

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)