Open Stack

On 08/22/2014 08:19 PM, John Dickinson wrote:
> I think Anne makes some excellent points about the pattern being
> proposed being unlikely to be commonly implemented across all the
> programs (or, at best, very difficult). Let's not try to formalize
> another "best practice" that works many times and force it to work
> every time. 

I kinda agree with John here. I think the most important effect of this
proposal is that it will add *transparency* to the development effort.
One of the most common questions I have to answer is 'Who should I talk
to to address this issue?" and I can't blame them. Just to give you an
example, the list of core reviewers of many project is not immediately
available, sometimes even the name of the PTL is missing from their wiki
pages (since the wiki pages don't follow a common template).

Since we've been growing so much I'm not surprised nor afraid of
becoming more of a bureaucratic organization (in Taylor/Weber's sense of
an organizational structure, we're simply growing up --poor wikipedia
page on this topic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_structure#Bureaucratic_structures)
and introduce more rules.

I like the idea of having a template of roles that support PTLs in their
job and I think we should let PTLs pick which of the roles to fill in,
but not divert too much from the common list of roles. And we need to
make sure that these roles and people are communicated properly.

I think we outgrew the phase where any PTL could experiment and
self-organize in full autonomy because snowflakes are too hard to manage
and produce only entropy at our size. We have too many projects,
programs and teams and if all of them operate very differently it
becomes next to impossible for newcomers to join. It gets too hard even
for community  managers to advice newcomers. We're too big for that.
Some level of standardization is inevitable :)

> And let's get the PTLs
> together for one or two days every cycle to discuss project issues.
> Just PTLs, and let's focus on the project management stuff and some
> cross-project issues.

This is orthogonal to the PTLs supporting roles: we can sure do
something to help in this aspect.

On another note, bike shed 'czar' gets -1 from me. Liaison or any of
fungi's suggestions sound better :)

/stef