[all][elections][tc] TC Election Campaigning Kickoff
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/T... Ian Y. Choi & Slawek Kaplonski, on behalf of election officials.
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? 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/T...
Ian Y. Choi & Slawek Kaplonski, on behalf of election officials.
Le mar. 26 août 2025 à 08:16, Goutham Pacha Ravi <gouthampravi@gmail.com> a écrit :
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. -Sylvain 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
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
next 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/T...
Ian Y. Choi & Slawek Kaplonski, on behalf of election officials.
On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 12:58 PM Sylvain Bauza <sbauza@redhat.com> wrote:
Le mar. 26 août 2025 à 08:16, Goutham Pacha Ravi <gouthampravi@gmail.com> a écrit :
Hello Candidates,
Thank you Goutham for starting the discussion.
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:
Indeed, it is a tough question.
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.
I agree with Sylvain that the Technical Committee must mitigate risk by evaluating dependencies and alternatives for a critical project. Alongside that, I believe we must proactively help projects avoid reaching such a situation. Based on my involvement with the Watcher Project, I would like to suggest two approaches that can help mitigate the lack of active contributors and build sustainable governance: - We should promote the Distributed Project Leadership (DPL) model [1] to empower active contributors to share project responsibilities. We did this for the Watcher project; it distributes ownership and empowers more people to lead, making the project more resilient. - To attract more contributors, we must clearly connect a project's work to the bigger picture. For example, linking the Watcher project to the VMware migration initiative gives potential contributors a compelling reason to get involved. The TC can help projects articulate their value and link it to these larger goals. These are the strategies I would bring to the TC to help the current project to thrive. Links: [1]. https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/distributed-project-leadership... With Regards, Chandan Kumar
Note: Boy ADD is fun. I thought I hit send on this days ago…. hey is that a squirrel outside my window?? So this has been an area of interest to me and something I’ve been trying to focus on this past year. I feel as if its a bit different in OpenStack then other open source projects. This is mostly because OpenStack is a series of projects under one governance umbrella. Those individual projects might be connected by different mechanisms. Sometimes they will literally use each other’s APIs but in other cases the same contributors might use both and that is their only connection or even be competing projects. Of course many other projects have similar situations with driver backends but this can be multiple in OpenStack. That being said it’s not an insurmountable challenge. Some things I believe we need to improve on are: - Ease of involvement/contribution. There are a number of projects where the barrier to entry is quite high. We’ve had people from OpenInfra donor organizations speak to the TC about getting patches merged from their organization. Patches which still remain unmerged. - Tooling / Documentation improvements. We’ve discussed this at a previous TC meeting before. Back when OpenStack had its own docs team it was possible to maintain custom themes and other supporting pieces. Today? Old release docs often document search results with a banner at the top which states its an out of date release with a link that takes you to the main docs home page. Many libraries have very minimal information available for them and what they do have is incomplete but gives a sense of completeness. - Core members unwilling to grow the number of core members or consider other models to graduate contributors towards core membership. I’ve heard from multiple projects that they do not have the cycles to review patches or they don’t know how to test them. But when you look at the patch there might be a handful of +1 reviews on it or detailed comments from the author about testing. There’s no way to differentiate a drive by +1 vs an active contributor doing reviews that other core members acknowledge as providing good reviews. Unfortunately much of this is working with the individual projects instead of something the TC can directly address across all projects at once. But I do believe its something the TC should strive to work on with those projects. — Doug
On Aug 26, 2025, at 1:15 AM, Goutham Pacha Ravi <gouthampravi@gmail.com> wrote:
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?
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/T...
Ian Y. Choi & Slawek Kaplonski, on behalf of election officials.
participants (5)
-
Chandan Kumar
-
Doug Goldstein
-
Goutham Pacha Ravi
-
Ian Y. Choi
-
Sylvain Bauza