Hi all, I'd like to issue a call for consolidation and simplification for OpenStack development. In the early years of the project, we faced a lot of challenges. We had to spread the development load across manageable-size groups, so we encouraged the creation of a lot of project teams. We wanted to capture all the energy that was sent towards the project, so we passed project structure reforms (like the big tent) that would aggressively include new community groups in the "official" OpenStack community. We needed to remove bottlenecks, so we encouraged decentralized decision making. And we had to answer unique challenges, so we created software to match them (Zuul). In summary, we had a lot of people, and not enough systems to organize them, so we created those. Fast-forward to 2020, and our challenges are different. The many systems that we created in the early days have created silos, with very small groups of people working in isolation, making cross-project work more difficult than it should be. The many systems that we created generate a lot of fragmentation. Like we have too many meetings (76, in case you were wondering), too much energy spent running them, too much frustration when nobody joins. Finally, the many systems that we created represent a lot of complexity for newcomers to handle. We have 180 IRC channels, most of them ghost towns where by the time someone answers, the person asking the question is long gone. So I think it's time to generally think about simplifying and consolidating things. It's not as easy as it sounds. Our successful decentralization efforts make it difficult to make the centralized decision to regroup. It's hard to justify time and energy spent to /remove/ things, especially those that we spent time creating in the first place. But we now have too many systems and not enough people, so we need to consolidate and simplify. Back around Havana, when we had around the same number of active contributors as today, we used to have 36 meetings and 20 teams. Do we really need 180 IRC channels, 76 meetings, 63 project teams (not even counting SIGs)? 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. Comments, thoughts? -- Thierry Carrez (ttx)