On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 12:58 PM Sylvain Bauza <sbauza@redhat.com> wrote:
Le mar. 26 août 2025 à 08:16, Goutham Pacha Ravi <gouthampravi@gmail.com> a écrit :
Hello Candidates,
Thank you Goutham for starting the discussion.
I'd like your view on handling a project team that is essential to the OpenStack ecosystem but is struggling with a lack of active contributors or a sustainable governance?
That's a very good but also tough question, and we’ve had experiences in the past related to it — including one very active as we speak. There are actually different approaches to this problem, depending on the overall nature of the project:
Indeed, it is a tough question.
If there are only one-off contributors and a lack of governance, I think we can reasonably identify that dependency as part of the OpenStack ecosystem if it is essential, and then determine whether we should propose the project to join the integrated release — based also on feedback from the release management team.
If the project itself is lacking support, then there is no magic bullet (in terms of finding “white knights” to save the project). In that case, we (as the TC) should evaluate the dependency needs: Is it a shared dependency across our OpenStack projects? Do we have an alternative that is very close to the existing project? Could another project volunteer to take it over (for example, the Nova team accepted to take back responsibility for the Placement service)? The eventlet removal effort also shows us that the larger the change, the more difficult and risky it can be so another identical situation would require us to get feedback from the teams but also from the operators in order to come up with a reasonable plan.
I agree with Sylvain that the Technical Committee must mitigate risk by evaluating dependencies and alternatives for a critical project. Alongside that, I believe we must proactively help projects avoid reaching such a situation. Based on my involvement with the Watcher Project, I would like to suggest two approaches that can help mitigate the lack of active contributors and build sustainable governance: - We should promote the Distributed Project Leadership (DPL) model [1] to empower active contributors to share project responsibilities. We did this for the Watcher project; it distributes ownership and empowers more people to lead, making the project more resilient. - To attract more contributors, we must clearly connect a project's work to the bigger picture. For example, linking the Watcher project to the VMware migration initiative gives potential contributors a compelling reason to get involved. The TC can help projects articulate their value and link it to these larger goals. These are the strategies I would bring to the TC to help the current project to thrive. Links: [1]. https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/distributed-project-leadership... With Regards, Chandan Kumar