[tc] Adapting office hours schedule to demand

Jeremy Stanley fungi at yuggoth.org
Tue Dec 18 15:38:12 UTC 2018


On 2018-12-18 15:52:51 +1300 (+1300), Zane Bitter wrote:
[...]
> TBH I'm not actually sure I know what we are trying to achieve at
> this point. When the TC started office hours it was as a more
> time-zone-friendly replacement for the weekly meeting. And the
> weekly meeting was mainly used for discussion amongst the TC
> members and those folks who consistently follow the TC's activity
> (many of whom are hopefully future TC candidates - the fact that
> largely only folks from certain time zones were joining this group
> was the problematic part of meetings to my mind). However,
> recently we've been saying that the purpose of office hours is to
> bring in folks who aren't part of that group to ask questions, and
> that the folks who are in the group should actively avoid
> discussion in order to not discourage them. Then we are surprised
> when things are quiet.

My interpretation of the resolution which created our office hours
is actually entirely that. It describes[0] them as "a good time for
non-TC members to interact with TC members" and "for folks from any
timezone to drop in and ask questions." Review comments on Flavio's
change[1] which added it, along with the ML thread[2] which kicked
off the idea and the subsequent TC meetings[3][4][5] where we
debated the topic all seem to back up that interpretation. A lot of
it stemmed from disproportionate geographic and cultural diversity
within the TC and other community leadership positions at that time,
and seeking ways to get representatives involved from more parts of
the World so they could better figure out how/why to become leaders
themselves.

> Is there actually any reason to think that there is a problematic
> level of under-reporting of TC-escalation-worthy issues? I can't
> think an a priori reason to expect that in a healthy project there
> should be large numbers of issues escalated to the TC. And despite
> focusing our meeting strategy around that and conducting a
> massively time-consuming campaign of reaching out to teams
> individually via the health checks, I'm not seeing any empirical
> evidence of it either.

As above, I don't think it's because we perceive a lack of
escalation for matters the TC should be handling, but just generally
about being more approachable and getting the community increasingly
involved in what we do so that we're not seen as some elite and
mystical (or out-of-touch) group of elders sending down decrees from
on high.

> Meanwhile there's ample evidence that we need more time to discuss
> things as a group - just witness the difficulty of getting through
> a monthly meeting in < 1 hour by trying to stick to purely
> procedural stuff.
[...]

When we dropped formal meetings, the idea was that we were going to
push all official TC discussion to the openstack-dev (now
openstack-discuss) mailing list and into openstack/governance change
reviews. It seems more like we've failed at doing that, if we have
trouble making the newly reestablished meetings more than just a
brief touchpoint to run through what discussions we're having in
those more appropriate and accessible venues. Also, I don't
personally think we've entirely failed at it, as we *aren't* having
this particular discussion in IRC. ;)

> IMHO our goal should be - like every other team's - to grow the
> group of people around the TC who form the 'governance team' for
> which the TC members are effectively the core reviewers, and from
> which we expect to find our next generation of TC members. While
> doing that, we must try to ensure that we're not structurally
> limiting the composition of the group by longitude. But I don't
> think we'll get there by trying to be quiet so they can speak up -
> we'll get there by being present and talking about interesting
> stuff that people want to join in on. If there's a problem with
> casual contributors making themselves heard, provide them with a
> way to get their topic on an informal agenda (or encourage them to
> begin on the mailing list) and make sure it gets raised during
> office hours so they are not drowned out.
> 
> I might support rejigging the times and dropping to twice a week
> if I thought that it meant a majority of the TC would show up each
> time and discussions would actually happen (we had an etherpad of
> topics at some point that I haven't seen in a long time). In that
> case I would even join the 10pm session if necessary to
> participate, though we should recognise that for folks from this
> part of the world who *don't* have a formal role that's a massive
> obstacle.

I do basically agree with these thoughts/suggestions at least. For
me, they fit just fine with why we started having office hours.
Unlike some, I don't think that having casual discussion between TC
members during IRC office hours is likely to be off-putting to
people who are maybe a little shy or simply afraid of interrupting
but want to engage us in conversation. I do however feel like trying
to force more official discussions during office hours is an
impediment, and we should be making sure those topics are being
handled more asynchronously instead so that they're open to
participation by a much wider audience.

[0] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20170425-drop-tc-weekly-meetings.html#office-hours
[1] https://review.openstack.org/459848
[2] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-April/115227.html
[3] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2017/tc.2017-04-25-20.00.log.html#l-385
[4] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2017/tc.2017-05-02-20.01.log.html#l-23
[5] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2017/tc.2017-05-16-20.01.log.html#l-316
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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