[tc] [all] Please help verify the role of the TC

Fox, Kevin M Kevin.Fox at pnnl.gov
Tue Jan 15 16:52:46 UTC 2019


Ah. Thanks for the clarification. You raise some interesting questions.

Lets explore a bit. Like you, I have no idea what the right solution is. just thinking out loud.

"What if the TC and PTLs were the same thing?"  One risk of making them the same is what
I was talking about before. But what about one way association rather then both ways?
something like "All PTL's have a seat on the TC and are required to attend meetings if
possible"? That would allow the PTL's to have a voice in the TC, to know what's going on at
the greater level and more easily feed back such info to the projects? It also would not
block non ptl's from having a voice too if elected. It might be easier to make decisions that effect
all the projects?

Would something like that have the effect you were thinking?

You mention that there might not be time for PTL's to do both things. Is there a scope of 
what a PTL does somewhere we could look at? Maybe some of the scope could be moved to
a different role to enable the TC stuff? A co-PTL or something?

Thanks,
Kevin
________________________________________
From: Chris Dent [cdent+os at anticdent.org]
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2019 3:01 AM
To: openstack-discuss at lists.openstack.org
Subject: RE: [tc] [all] Please help verify the role of the TC

On Mon, 14 Jan 2019, Fox, Kevin M wrote:

> Been chewing on this thread for a while.... I think I should advocate the other direction.

I'm not sure where to rejoin this thread, so picking here as it
provides a reasonable entry point. First: thanks to everyone who has
joined in, I honestly do feel that as annoying as these discussions
can be, they often reveal something useful.

Second, things went a bit sideways from the point I was trying to
reach. I wasn't trying to say that PTLs are the obvious and
experienced choice for TC leadership, nor that they were best placed
to represent the community. I hope that my own behavior over the
past few years has made it clear that I very definitely do not feel
that way.

However, as most respondents on this thread have pointed out, both
TC members and PTLs are described as being over-tasked. What I'm
trying to tease out or ask is: Are they over-tasked because they are
working on too many things (or at least trying to sort through the
too many things); a situation that results from _no unified
technical leadership for the community_.

My initial assertion was that the TC is insufficiently involved in
defining and performing technical leadership.

Then I implied that the TC cannot do anything like actionable and
unified technical leadership because they have little to no real
executive power and what power they do have (for example, trying to
make openstack-wide goals) is in conflict (because of the limits of
time and space) with the goals that PTLs (and others) are trying to
enact.

Thus: What if the TC and PTLs were the same thing? Would it become
more obvious that there's too much in play to make progress in a
unified direction (on the thing called OpenStack), leading us to
choose less to do, and choose more consistency and actionable
leadership? And would it enable some power to execute on that
leadership.

Those are questions, not assertions.

> Getting some diversity of ideas from outside of those from PTL's
> is probably a good idea for the overall health of OpenStack. What
> about Users that have never been PTL's? Not developers?

So, to summarize: While I agree we need a diversity of ideas, I
don't think we lack for ideas, nor have we ever. What we lack
is a small enough set of ideas to act on them with significant
enough progress to make a real difference. How can we make the list
small and (to bring this back to the TC role) empower the TC to
execute on that list?

And, to be complete, should we?

And, to be extra really complete, I'm not sure if we should or not,
which is why I'm asking.

--
Chris Dent                       ٩◔̯◔۶           https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent


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