Ildiko Vancsa <ildiko.vancsa@gmail.com> wrote:
First of all I like the idea of pop-up teams.
On 2019. Feb 8., at 10:18, Adam Spiers <aspiers@suse.com> wrote:
True. And for temporary docs / notes / brainstorming there's the wiki and etherpad. So yeah, in terms of infrastructure maybe IRC meetings in one of the communal meeting channels is the only thing needed. We'd still need to take care of ensuring that popups are easily discoverable by anyone, however. And this ties in with the "should we require official approval" debate - maybe a halfway house is the right balance between red tape and agility? For example, set up a table on a page like
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Popup_teams
and warmly encourage newly forming teams to register themselves by adding a row to that table. Suggested columns:
- Team name - One-line summary of team purpose - Expected life span (optional) - Link to team wiki page or etherpad - Link to IRC meeting schedule (if any) - Other comments
Or if that's too much of a free-for-all, it could be a slightly more formal process of submitting a review to add a row to a page:
https://governance.openstack.org/popup-teams/
which would be similar in spirit to:
https://governance.openstack.org/sigs/
Either this or a wiki page would ensure that anyone can easily discover what teams are currently in existence, or have been in the past (since historical information is often useful too). Just thinking out aloud …
In my experience there are two crucial steps to make a cross-project team work successful. The first is making sure that the proposed new feature/enhancement is accepted by all teams. The second is to have supporters from every affected project team preferably also resulting in involvement during both design and review time maybe also during feature development and testing phase.
When these two steps are done you can work on the design part and making sure you have the work items prioritized on each side in a way that you don’t end up with road blocks that would delay the work by multiple release cycles.
Makes perfect sense to me - thanks for sharing!
To help with all this I would start the experiment with wiki pages and etherpads as these are all materials you can point to without too much formality to follow so the goals, drivers, supporters and progress are visible to everyone who’s interested and to the TC to follow-up on.
Do we expect an approval process to help with or even drive either of the crucial steps I listed above?
I'm not sure if it would help. But I agree that visibility is important, and by extension also discoverability. To that end I think it would be worth hosting a central list of popup initiatives somewhere which links to the available materials for each initiative. Maybe it doesn't matter too much whether that central list is simply a wiki page or a static web page managed by Gerrit under a governance repo or similar.