Practical exercise: find ironic on openstack.org. The best path involves two clicks and you only land on a component page[1] without much explanations. Or you reach https://www.openstack.org/bare-metal/ which is great, but more about the use case than the software. We are collectively to blame for this. The data on that component page is maintained by a repo[2] that I issued multiple calls for help for, and yet there aren't many changes proposed to expand the information presented there. And having a mix of a Foundation and a product website coexist at openstack.org means the information is buried so deeply someone born in this century would likely never find it.
I think we need to improve on that, but it takes time due to how search engines work. I may sound like a broken record, but the solution in my opinion is to have basic, component-specific websites for components that can be run standalone. Think ironic.io (except .io domains are horrible and it's already taken). A website that would solely be dedicated to presenting Ironic, and would only mention OpenStack in the fineprint, or as a possible integration. It would list Ironic releases outside of openstack cycle context, and display Ironic docs without the openstack branding.
That would go further to solve the issue than any governance change IMHO. Thoughts?
[1] https://www.openstack.org/software/releases/train/components/ironic [2] https://opendev.org/osf/openstack-map/
I wonder if it could help if we have something like: used_independently: true in https://opendev.org/osf/openstack-map/src/branch/master/openstack_components...