All, I’ve spent the last few years watching the activities of the technical committee , and in recent cycles, I’m seeing a significant increase in both members of our community asking the TC to take action on things, and the TC volunteering to take action on things in the course of internal discussions (meetings, #openstack-tc, etc.). In combination, these trends appear to have significantly increased the amount of time that members of the technical committee spend on “TC work”, and decreased the time that they spend on other activities in OpenStack. As such, I suggest that the Technical Committee be restricted from actually doing anything beyond approval of merges to the governance repository.
Firstly, we select members of the technical committee from amongst those of us who have some of the deepest understanding of the entire project and frequently those actively involved in multiple projects and engaged in cross-project coordination on a regular basis. Anything less than this fails to produce enough name recognition for election. As such, when asking the TC to be responsible for activities, we should equally ask whether we wish the very people responsible for the efficiency of our collaboration to cease doing so in favor of whatever we may have assigned to the TC.
Secondly, in order to ensure continuity, we need to provide a means for rotation of the TC: this is both to allow folk on the TC to pursue other activities, and to allow folk not on the TC to join the TC and help with governance and coordination. If we wish to increase the number of folk who might be eligible for the TC, we do this best by encouraging them to take on activities that involve many projects or affect activities over all of OpenStack. These activities must necessarily be taken by those not current TC members in order to provide a platform for visibility to allow those doing them to later become TC members.
Solutions to both of these issues have been suggested involving changing the size of the TC. If we decrease the size of the TC, it becomes less important to provide mechanisms for new people to develop reputation over the entire project, but this ends up concentrating the work of the TC to a smaller number of hands, and likely reduces the volume of work overall accomplished. If we increase the size of the TC, it becomes less burdensome for the TC to take on these activities, but this ends up foundering against the question of who in our community has sufficient experience with all aspects of OpenStack to fill the remaining seats (and how to maintain a suitable set of folk to provide TC continuity).
If we instead simply assert that the TC is explicitly not responsible for any activities beyond governance approvals, we both reduce the impact that being elected to the TC has on the ability of our most prolific contributors to continue their activities and provide a means for folk who have expressed interest and initiative to broadly contribute and demonstrate their suitability for nomination in a future TC election
Feedback encouraged