Yes, we all specialized over time, so it's hard to merge for example Oslo + Requirements, or QA + Infrastructure, or Stable + Release Management, or Monasca + Telemetry. We are all overextended so it's hard to learn new tricks or codebases. And yet, while I'm not really sure what the best approach is, I think it's necessary.
We've often had a fair amount of overlap between Oslo and some of the other horizontal teams like releases and requirements, which makes a certain amount of sense since they're all cross-OpenStack efforts. Naturally they tend to attract the same people.
That said, would it make sense to merge with any of them? I'm unsure. And that's not a passive-aggressive "unsure", I actually don't know ;-).
I will say that I feel pretty good about where the Oslo team is right now. Our meetings are generally well-attended, I would say even better than they were a year ago, and there's good discussion that happens. Many weeks topics are brought up by someone who is not me, which seems like a good sign of engagement. I guess we'll see what happens in the upcoming PTL election, but I'm not feeling like we need to do anything drastic to ensure a positive future for the project.
Maybe that's an argument that we should bring another smaller team under our umbrella. We kind of just did that with the docs team not so long ago. I don't know if anyone else has strong opinions about how that has gone - mostly it hasn't changed much for me as PTL other than having a few more projects to review and release from time to time. I'm not sure if there are other projects where a merger would go as smoothly, but I'm open to suggestions.
I don't know if any of the above is helpful at all, but I think it's a good summary of my thoughts as I've considered this.
I agree with this assessment. There are overlaps in people, but I do think that is just due to cross-project interests, not because there is much overlap in the work being done. I know these were just suggestions to get folks thinking, but for the specific idea of oslo+requirements - I think there are much different areas of focus for these and for at least this instance, there doesn't seem to be much benefit in combining teams. If anything, like Ben mentions, Oslo is growing and could maybe benefit from some loose collection of smaller teams. Sean