[tc][election] New series of campaign questions

Graham Hayes gr at ham.ie
Tue Feb 26 13:15:59 UTC 2019



On 25/02/2019 09:28, Jean-Philippe Evrard wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Here are my questions for the candidates. Keep in mind some might overlap with existing questions, so I would expect a little different answer there than what was said. Most questions are intentionally controversial and non-strategic, so please play this spiritual game openly as much as you can (no hard feelings!).
> 
> The objective for me with those questions is not to corner you/force you implement x if you were elected (that would be using my TC hat for asking you questions, which I believe would be wrong), but instead have a glimpse on your mindset (which is important for me as an individual member in OpenStack). It's more like the "magic wand" questions. After this long introduction, here is my volley of questions.
> 
> A) In a world where "general" OpenStack issues/features are solved through community goals, do you think the TC should focus on "less interesting" technical issues across projects, like tech debt reduction? Or at the opposite, do you think the TC should tackle the hardest OpenStack wide problems?

Both - the TC should be helping to highlight where work needs to be
done, and that can include debt cleanup, and cross project features.

(that said, tech debt is probably one of the hardest OpenStack wide
problems).

I think I have seen this said somewhere in the mountain of election
emails sent this year, but the TC needs to be a group that enables
the community to do things, be that debt cleanup like py3 support,
user documentation like api-ref, or cross project features like
volume multi attach.

> B) Do you think the TC must check and actively follow all the official projects' health and activities? Why?

Yes, I think it is important to follow - we don't want the first time
we know a project is in trouble is the "we have a single volunteer
as a developer" email / blog post.

> C) Do you think the TC's role is to "empower" project and PTLs? If yes, how do you think the TC can help those? If no, do you think it would be the other way around, with PTLs empowering the TC to achieve more? How and why?

Yes - but it is also to empower users and other people in the community.

> D) Do you think the community goals should be converted to a "backlog"of time constrained OpenStack "projects", instead of being constrained per cycle? (with the ability to align some goals with releasing when necessary)

No. I think having these goals limited to a cycle means that there is a
lot more of a chance that projects will actually get them done. If
we allow for them to be 2,3,4 cycles long, I think we will loose the
critical mass of projects completing them.

That is not to say we can't have things that are important that run for
2+ cycles, but I do not think they should be goals. They could
definitely have a goal as an endpoint to finish off a larger effort,
but not as a multi cycle goal.

> E) Do you think we should abandon projects' ML tags/IRC channels, to replace them by focus areas? For example, having [storage] to group people from [cinder] or [manila]. Do you think that would help new contributors, or communication in the community?

Abandon, no. Use in addition to the current set, yes. - See the bare
metal SIG for how we can do cross project, focused development.

> F) There can be multiple years between a "user desired feature across OpenStack projects", and its actual implementation through the community goals. How do you think we can improve?

This is a hard issue. Due to the size of the project, and differing
priorities of each set of developers, getting a single unified roadmap
for user requested features is hard.

Combine this with the criticality of what our software is used for,
and you have a perfect storm of long pipelines for new versions
(on the order of years, not cycles), and the feedback loop is too
long for a "move fast and break things" mentality.  By the time
the users have the feature (even if we did get it completed in a
cycle), the people who worked on the feature, documented it, tested
it and guided it, are possibly moved on to something else, or have
lost the short term context to deal with the feedback.

> G) What do you think of the elections process for the TC? Do you think it is good enough to gather a team to work on hard problems? Or do you think electing person per person have an opposite effect, highlighting individuals versus a common program/shared objectives? Corollary: Do you think we should now elect TC members by groups (of 2 or 3 persons for example), so that we would highlight their program vs highlight individual ideas/qualities?

I think what we have is the best of a bad selection. Lists are
inherently exclusionary, and tend to make sure that views and
groups are entrenched (see mainland EU parties).

While the current process can create name recognition based
voting, the name recognition is usually associated with someone
who did something cross project, or in a larger project, which can
mean that they have a good view of how things are working.

> Thanks for your patience, and thanks for your application!
> 
> Regards,
> Jean-Philippe Evrard (evrardjp)
> 

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