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Should we:

- Reduce office hours to one or two per week, possibly rotating times

- Dump the whole idea and just encourage people to ask questions at any time on #openstack-tc, and get asynchronous answers

- Keep it as-is, it still has the side benefit of triggering spikes of TC member activity

I vote for keeping it to two in a week which can cover both Asia and USA/EU TZ which mean either dropping either Tuesday or Wednesday. If traffic is same in office hours then also it is ok as it does not take any extra effort from us. we keep doing our day activity and keep eyes on channel during that time. Obviously it does not mean we will not active in other time but it is good to save a particular slot where people can find more than one TC.

-gmann

This seems reasonable. The 01:00 UTC office hour on Wednesday has never had much activity. I think there are usually a few folks around in case someone does show up with some questions, but I have yet to see that actually happen. I think we could drop Wednesday with little noticeable impact, while still staying accessible via IRC or the mailing list. Sean

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 11:02 AM Doug Hellmann <doug@doughellmann.com> wrote:

Doug Hellmann <doug@doughellmann.com> writes:

...

Thierry Carrez <thierry@openstack.org> writes:

...

Hi,

A while ago, the Technical Committee designated specific hours in the week where members would make extra effort to be around on #openstack-tc on IRC, so that community members looking for answers to their questions or wanting to engage can find a time convenient for them and a critical mass of TC members around. We currently have 3 weekly spots:

- 09:00 UTC on Tuesdays - 01:00 UTC on Wednesdays - 15:00 UTC on Thursdays

But after a few months it appears that:

1/ nobody really comes on channel at office hour time to ask questions. We had a questions on the #openstack-tc IRC channel, but I wouldn't say people take benefit of the synced time

2/ some office hours (most notably the 01:00 UTC on Wednesdays, but also to a lesser extent the 09:00 UTC on Tuesdays) end up just being a couple of TC members present

So the schedule is definitely not reaching its objectives, and as such may be a bit overkill. I was also wondering if this is not a case where the offer is hurting the demand -- by having so many office hour spots around, nobody considers them special.

Should we:

- Reduce office hours to one or two per week, possibly rotating times

- Dump the whole idea and just encourage people to ask questions at any time on #openstack-tc, and get asynchronous answers

- Keep it as-is, it still has the side benefit of triggering spikes of TC member activity

Thoughts ?

-- Thierry Carrez (ttx)

I would like for us to make a decision about this.

The 0100 Wednesday meeting was generally seen as a good candidate to drop, if we do drop one. No one seemed to support the idea of rotating meeting times, so I'm going to eliminate that from consideration. We can discuss the idea of changing the schedule of the meetings separately from how many we want to have, so I will also postpone that question for later.

TC members, please respond to this thread indicating your support for one of these options:

1. Keep the 3 fixed office hours. 2. Drop the 0100 Wednesday meeting, keeping the other 2. 3. Drop all office hours.

-- Doug

I prefer option 2, but could also accept option 1. I think option 3 is a bad idea, because even if we are not seeing many community requests during office hours, it does give us an opportunity to sync up and discuss current events.

I have a similar opinion. I support the first two options and I agree that option #3 is a bad idea. I'm not sure I have a preference of either of the first two options. I like the idea of option #1, since it's APAC friendly (and APAC communication is a frequent topic at TC gatherings), but I won't object if the overall consensus is to drop that particular time.

-- Doug

The 0100 Wednesday meeting was generally seen as a good candidate to drop, if we do drop one. No one seemed to support the idea of rotating meeting times, so I'm going to eliminate that from consideration. We can discuss the idea of changing the schedule of the meetings separately from how many we want to have, so I will also postpone that question for later.

TC members, please respond to this thread indicating your support for one of these options:

1. Keep the 3 fixed office hours. 2. Drop the 0100 Wednesday meeting, keeping the other 2. 3. Drop all office hours.

-- Doug

I'm about even on 1 or 2. Since there are a few TC folks that are able and willing to be around for the 0100 office hour, it doesn't really hurt to keep it as an encouraged time for anyone from those timezones to stop by with any questions. That said, these office hours were really only to "encourage" times when someone would be around for questions. It doesn't mean we couldn't drop it as an office hour and still have folks asking questions in the -tc channel. I guess that just depends on how much we want to try to get TC members to be immediately responsive during those times. I would not want to go with 3 and drop all office hours completely. I think we need at a minimum one office hour a week. Sean

On Tue, 18 Dec 2018, Zane Bitter wrote: This is such a great message that I feel obliged to respond, even though I haven't got much to add. But I will anyway, because I love email.

Of those options I think I have to vote for 1. The 0100 Wednesday is (temporarily) the only one I can actually attend, so I'm in favour of keeping it. I'm also deeply sceptical that having fewer office hours will boost interest.

Agreed.

TBH I'm not actually sure I know what we are trying to achieve at this point. When the TC started office hours it was as a more time-zone-friendly replacement for the weekly meeting. And the weekly meeting was mainly used for discussion amongst the TC members and those folks who consistently follow the TC's activity (many of whom are hopefully future TC candidates - the fact that largely only folks from certain time zones were joining this group was the problematic part of meetings to my mind). However, recently we've been saying that the purpose of office hours is to bring in folks who aren't part of that group to ask questions, and that the folks who are in the group should actively avoid discussion in order to not discourage them. Then we are surprised when things are quiet.

I believe where we went wrong was thinking that people want us to answer questions. I'm sure there's some desire for that, but I suspect there are plenty of other people who want us to _do stuff_, some of which is hard stuff that requires the big talks and major efforts that come about from reaching consensus through fairly casual conversation.

(A more cynical person than I might suggest that going searching for trivial issues that we can 'solve' by fiat offers a higher dopamine-to-time-spent ratio than working together as a team to do... anything at all, and that this may explain some of its popularity.)

Dopamine Ho!

IMHO our goal should be - like every other team's - to grow the group of people around the TC who form the 'governance team' for which the TC members are effectively the core reviewers, and from which we expect to find our next generation of TC members. While doing that, we must try to ensure that we're not structurally limiting the composition of the group by longitude. But I don't think we'll get there by trying to be quiet so they can speak up - we'll get there by being present and talking about interesting stuff that people want to join in on. If there's a problem with casual contributors making themselves heard, provide them with a way to get their topic on an informal agenda (or encourage them to begin on the mailing list) and make sure it gets raised during office hours so they are not drowned out.

Yes. "Talking about interesting stuff" seems to have tailed off a lot lately. -- Chris Dent ٩◔̯◔۶ https://anticdent.org/ freenode: cdent tw: @anticdent

---- On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 22:52:41 +0900 Doug Hellmann <doug@doughellmann.com> wrote ----

Zane Bitter <zbitter@redhat.com> writes:

...

Is there actually any reason to think that there is a problematic level of under-reporting of TC-escalation-worthy issues? I can't think an a priori reason to expect that in a healthy project there should be large numbers of issues escalated to the TC. And despite focusing our meeting strategy around that and conducting a massively time-consuming campaign of reaching out to teams individually via the health checks, I'm not seeing any empirical evidence of it either. Meanwhile there's ample evidence that we need more time to discuss things as a group - just witness the difficulty of getting through a monthly meeting in < 1 hour by trying to stick to purely procedural stuff.

(A more cynical person than I might suggest that going searching for trivial issues that we can 'solve' by fiat offers a higher dopamine-to-time-spent ratio than working together as a team to do... anything at all, and that this may explain some of its popularity.)

I suggested we start doing the health checks more formally after the 2nd Vancouver summit because during that week we did discover issues that 2 teams had been dealing with for at least a cycle, if not longer. The teams involved never escalated the problems, and the situations had devolved into lingering anger and resentment. In one case we had a project purposefully being misconfigured in CI in a misguided attempt to "force" the team to comply with some policy by making it impossible for them to test a feature. Once we found out about the problems, we had them resolved within the week.

So, I don't think it's too much to ask of TC members to actively seek out team leads and try to establish a line of communication to avoid ending up in that situation again. I consider it a preventive measure.

+1. This is nice point. Establishing communication (free and live communication) with team leads is something will solve a lot of problems. I remember few teams lead telling me that they heard first time from TC about checking "what issues they are facing and want us to solve". TC reaching out to team leads via health check/informal meeting during events etc can make all the teams more free to raise the question to TC or suggest/request the team needs at least. This is especially good for projects which are more independent services and not interacting with other openstack services/team. They are small team and it is good to tell our presence and we are there to help them. -gmann

-- Doug

On 2018-12-18 15:52:51 +1300 (+1300), Zane Bitter wrote: [...]

TBH I'm not actually sure I know what we are trying to achieve at this point. When the TC started office hours it was as a more time-zone-friendly replacement for the weekly meeting. And the weekly meeting was mainly used for discussion amongst the TC members and those folks who consistently follow the TC's activity (many of whom are hopefully future TC candidates - the fact that largely only folks from certain time zones were joining this group was the problematic part of meetings to my mind). However, recently we've been saying that the purpose of office hours is to bring in folks who aren't part of that group to ask questions, and that the folks who are in the group should actively avoid discussion in order to not discourage them. Then we are surprised when things are quiet.

My interpretation of the resolution which created our office hours is actually entirely that. It describes[0] them as "a good time for non-TC members to interact with TC members" and "for folks from any timezone to drop in and ask questions." Review comments on Flavio's change[1] which added it, along with the ML thread[2] which kicked off the idea and the subsequent TC meetings[3][4][5] where we debated the topic all seem to back up that interpretation. A lot of it stemmed from disproportionate geographic and cultural diversity within the TC and other community leadership positions at that time, and seeking ways to get representatives involved from more parts of the World so they could better figure out how/why to become leaders themselves.

Is there actually any reason to think that there is a problematic level of under-reporting of TC-escalation-worthy issues? I can't think an a priori reason to expect that in a healthy project there should be large numbers of issues escalated to the TC. And despite focusing our meeting strategy around that and conducting a massively time-consuming campaign of reaching out to teams individually via the health checks, I'm not seeing any empirical evidence of it either.

As above, I don't think it's because we perceive a lack of escalation for matters the TC should be handling, but just generally about being more approachable and getting the community increasingly involved in what we do so that we're not seen as some elite and mystical (or out-of-touch) group of elders sending down decrees from on high.

Meanwhile there's ample evidence that we need more time to discuss things as a group - just witness the difficulty of getting through a monthly meeting in < 1 hour by trying to stick to purely procedural stuff. [...]

When we dropped formal meetings, the idea was that we were going to push all official TC discussion to the openstack-dev (now openstack-discuss) mailing list and into openstack/governance change reviews. It seems more like we've failed at doing that, if we have trouble making the newly reestablished meetings more than just a brief touchpoint to run through what discussions we're having in those more appropriate and accessible venues. Also, I don't personally think we've entirely failed at it, as we *aren't* having this particular discussion in IRC. ;)

IMHO our goal should be - like every other team's - to grow the group of people around the TC who form the 'governance team' for which the TC members are effectively the core reviewers, and from which we expect to find our next generation of TC members. While doing that, we must try to ensure that we're not structurally limiting the composition of the group by longitude. But I don't think we'll get there by trying to be quiet so they can speak up - we'll get there by being present and talking about interesting stuff that people want to join in on. If there's a problem with casual contributors making themselves heard, provide them with a way to get their topic on an informal agenda (or encourage them to begin on the mailing list) and make sure it gets raised during office hours so they are not drowned out.

I might support rejigging the times and dropping to twice a week if I thought that it meant a majority of the TC would show up each time and discussions would actually happen (we had an etherpad of topics at some point that I haven't seen in a long time). In that case I would even join the 10pm session if necessary to participate, though we should recognise that for folks from this part of the world who *don't* have a formal role that's a massive obstacle.

I do basically agree with these thoughts/suggestions at least. For me, they fit just fine with why we started having office hours. Unlike some, I don't think that having casual discussion between TC members during IRC office hours is likely to be off-putting to people who are maybe a little shy or simply afraid of interrupting but want to engage us in conversation. I do however feel like trying to force more official discussions during office hours is an impediment, and we should be making sure those topics are being handled more asynchronously instead so that they're open to participation by a much wider audience. [0] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20170425-drop-tc-weekly-meet... [1] https://review.openstack.org/459848 [2] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-April/115227.html [3] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2017/tc.2017-04-25-20.00.log.html... [4] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2017/tc.2017-05-02-20.01.log.html... [5] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2017/tc.2017-05-16-20.01.log.html... -- Jeremy Stanley

Doug Hellmann wrote:

My impression of the answers so far is that everyone would be able to live with option 1 (keeping the 3 fixed office hour slots), so let's do that.

If you disagree, please do speak up. I know we haven't heard from everyone, yet.

I have no objection. I just wanted us to take a quick step back and reconsider, given the limited outside participation we've been getting on those. I agree that they are cheap to maintain and create peaks of activity in the channel that are generally useful. -- Thierry Carrez (ttx)