On 18/12/18 5:58 AM, Doug Hellmann wrote:
Thierry Carrez <thierry@openstack.org> writes:
Hi,
A while ago, the Technical Committee designated specific hours in the week where members would make extra effort to be around on #openstack-tc on IRC, so that community members looking for answers to their questions or wanting to engage can find a time convenient for them and a critical mass of TC members around. We currently have 3 weekly spots:
- 09:00 UTC on Tuesdays - 01:00 UTC on Wednesdays - 15:00 UTC on Thursdays
But after a few months it appears that:
1/ nobody really comes on channel at office hour time to ask questions. We had a questions on the #openstack-tc IRC channel, but I wouldn't say people take benefit of the synced time
2/ some office hours (most notably the 01:00 UTC on Wednesdays, but also to a lesser extent the 09:00 UTC on Tuesdays) end up just being a couple of TC members present
So the schedule is definitely not reaching its objectives, and as such may be a bit overkill. I was also wondering if this is not a case where the offer is hurting the demand -- by having so many office hour spots around, nobody considers them special.
Should we:
- Reduce office hours to one or two per week, possibly rotating times
- Dump the whole idea and just encourage people to ask questions at any time on #openstack-tc, and get asynchronous answers
- Keep it as-is, it still has the side benefit of triggering spikes of TC member activity
Thoughts ?
-- Thierry Carrez (ttx)
I would like for us to make a decision about this.
The 0100 Wednesday meeting was generally seen as a good candidate to drop, if we do drop one. No one seemed to support the idea of rotating meeting times, so I'm going to eliminate that from consideration. We can discuss the idea of changing the schedule of the meetings separately from how many we want to have, so I will also postpone that question for later.
TC members, please respond to this thread indicating your support for one of these options:
1. Keep the 3 fixed office hours. 2. Drop the 0100 Wednesday meeting, keeping the other 2. 3. Drop all office hours.
Of those options I think I have to vote for 1. The 0100 Wednesday is (temporarily) the only one I can actually attend, so I'm in favour of keeping it. I'm also deeply sceptical that having fewer office hours will boost interest. TBH I'm not actually sure I know what we are trying to achieve at this point. When the TC started office hours it was as a more time-zone-friendly replacement for the weekly meeting. And the weekly meeting was mainly used for discussion amongst the TC members and those folks who consistently follow the TC's activity (many of whom are hopefully future TC candidates - the fact that largely only folks from certain time zones were joining this group was the problematic part of meetings to my mind). However, recently we've been saying that the purpose of office hours is to bring in folks who aren't part of that group to ask questions, and that the folks who are in the group should actively avoid discussion in order to not discourage them. Then we are surprised when things are quiet. Is there actually any reason to think that there is a problematic level of under-reporting of TC-escalation-worthy issues? I can't think an a priori reason to expect that in a healthy project there should be large numbers of issues escalated to the TC. And despite focusing our meeting strategy around that and conducting a massively time-consuming campaign of reaching out to teams individually via the health checks, I'm not seeing any empirical evidence of it either. Meanwhile there's ample evidence that we need more time to discuss things as a group - just witness the difficulty of getting through a monthly meeting in < 1 hour by trying to stick to purely procedural stuff. (A more cynical person than I might suggest that going searching for trivial issues that we can 'solve' by fiat offers a higher dopamine-to-time-spent ratio than working together as a team to do... anything at all, and that this may explain some of its popularity.) IMHO our goal should be - like every other team's - to grow the group of people around the TC who form the 'governance team' for which the TC members are effectively the core reviewers, and from which we expect to find our next generation of TC members. While doing that, we must try to ensure that we're not structurally limiting the composition of the group by longitude. But I don't think we'll get there by trying to be quiet so they can speak up - we'll get there by being present and talking about interesting stuff that people want to join in on. If there's a problem with casual contributors making themselves heard, provide them with a way to get their topic on an informal agenda (or encourage them to begin on the mailing list) and make sure it gets raised during office hours so they are not drowned out. I might support rejigging the times and dropping to twice a week if I thought that it meant a majority of the TC would show up each time and discussions would actually happen (we had an etherpad of topics at some point that I haven't seen in a long time). In that case I would even join the 10pm session if necessary to participate, though we should recognise that for folks from this part of the world who *don't* have a formal role that's a massive obstacle. cheers, Zane.