Chris,
Thank you for your questions. I agree that not having the election deprived the community of a chance to get to know the candidates better so I am happy to help out here. :-)
Hope my thoughts in-line below make sense!
Jay
On 9/4/2019 5:32 AM, Chris Dent wrote:
On Wed, 4 Sep 2019, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
Thank you to all candidates who put their name forward for Project Team Lead (PTL) and Technical Committee (TC) in this election. A healthy, open process breeds trust in our decision making capability thank you to all those who make this process possible.
Congratulations and thank you to the people taking on these roles.
We need to talk about the fact that there was no opportunity to vote in these "elections" (PTL or TC) because there were insufficient candidates. No matter the quality of new leaders (this looks like a good group), something is amiss. We danced around these issue for the two years I was on the TC, but we never did anything concrete to significantly change things, carrying on doing things in the same way in a world where those ways no longer seemed to fit.
We can't claim any "seem" about it any more: OpenStack governance and leadership structures do not fit and we need to figure out the necessary adjustments.
I was surprised that we didn't have any PTL elections. I don't know that this is all bad. At least in the case of the Cinder team it seems to be a process that we have just kind-of internalized. I got my chance to be PTL and was ready for a break. I had reached out to Brian Rosmaita some time ago and had been grooming him to take over. I had discussions with other people knew Brian was interested, so we went forward that way.
I think this is a natural progression for where OpenStack is at right now. There isn't a lot of contention over how the project needs to be run right now. In the future that may change and I think having our election process is important for if and when that happens.
I haven't got any new ideas (which is part of why I left the TC). My position has always been that with a vendor and enterprise led project like OpenStack, where those vendors and enterprises are operating in a huge market, staffing the commonwealth in a healthy fashion is their responsibility. In large part because they are responsible for making OpenStack resistant to "casual" contribution in the first place (e.g., "hardware defined software").
We get people, sometimes, but it is not healthy:
i may see different cross-sections of the community than others do, but i feel like there's been a strong tone of burnout since 2012 [1]
This is a very real concern for me. We do have a very few people who have taken over a lot of responsibility for OpenStack and are getting burned out. We also need to have more companies start investing in OpenStack again. We can't, however, force them to participate.
I know from my last year or so at Lenovo that there are customers with real interest in OpenStack. OpenStack is running in the real world. I don't know if it is just working for people or if the customers are modifying it themselves and not contributing back. It would be interesting to get numbers on this. Not sure how we can do that. I am afraid, in the past, that the community got a reputation of being 'too hard to contribute to'. If that perception is still hurting us now it is something that we need to address.
I think that some of the lack of participation is also due to cultural differences in the geos where OpenStack has been expanding. That is a very hard problem to address.
We drastically need to change the expectations we place on ourselves in terms of velocity.
[1] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/%23openstack-tc/%23openstack-tc.2019-...
Ghanshyam Mann (gmann) Jean-Philippe Evrard (evrardjp) Jay Bryant (jungleboyj) Kevin Carter (cloudnull) Kendall Nelson (diablo_rojo) Nate Johnston (njohnston)
Since there was no need to vote, there was no need to campaign, which means we will be missing out on the Q&A period. I've found those very useful for understanding the issues that are present in the community and for generating ideas on what to about them. I think it is good to have that process anyway so I'll start:
What do you think we, as a community, can do about the situation described above? What do you as a TC member hope to do yourself?
I addressed this a bit in my candidacy note. I think that we need to continue to improve our education and on-boarding processes. Though I don't think it is hard to contribute successfully to OpenStack, there is a lot of tribal knowledge required to be successful in OpenStack. Documenting those things will help.
I would like to work with the foundation to reach out to companies and find out why they are less likely to participate than they used to be. People are using OpenStack ... why aren't they contributing. Perhaps it is a question that we could add to the user survey. I know when I had the foundation reach out to companies that were about to lose their drivers from Cinder, we got responses. So, I think that is a path we could consider.
Thanks