Hello Candidates,

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:

• 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.

In any case, whatever the solutions may be, the point is that if something is essential to the OpenStack ecosystem, my personal view is that the Technical Committee has a responsibility to act as a facilitator and help shepherd initiatives that aim to mitigate the risk.

Thanks,
Goutham


On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 4:52 PM Ian Y. Choi <ianyrchoi@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Developers,
>     The TC Election Campaigning Period has now started[1].  During the next
> couple days, you are all encouraged to ask the candidates questions about
> their platforms[2], opinions on OpenStack, community governance, and anything
> else that will help you to better determine how you will vote.  This is the
> time to raise any issues you wish the future TC to consider, and to evaluate
> the opinions of the nominees prior to their election.
>
> Candidates,
>     Each of you has posted a platform[2], and announced your nomination to
> the developers.  From this point, you are encouraged to ask each other
> questions about the posted platforms, and begin discussion of any points
> that you feel are particularly important during the next cycle.  While you
> are not yet TC members, your voices and opinions about the issues raised in
> your platforms and questions raised by the wider community will help ensure
> that the future TC has the widest possible input on the matters of community
> concern, and the electorate has the best information to determine the ideal
> TC composition to address these and other issues that may arise.
>
> [1] https://governance.openstack.org/election/
> [2] https://opendev.org/openstack/election/src/branch/master/candidates/2026.1/TC
>
>
> Ian Y. Choi & Slawek Kaplonski, on behalf of election officials.