[openstack-dev] [all] Question for the TC candidates

Maish Saidel-Keesing maishsk at maishsk.com
Wed Apr 29 09:59:35 UTC 2015


Again my apologies for the incorrect format - since I am still not 
receiving the messages from this thread.

Please see my comments with the abstracts within (unfortunately not 
necessarily in the correct order)

I think that the point here was that Doug mentioned that there was 
communication

>/  > I believe all of the posts were on the main OpenStack foundation blog
/>/  > under the "technical committee" tag [1], and they also went to
/>/  > planet.openstack.org for folks who subscribe to the entire community
/>/  > feed.
/>/  
/

Doug - evidently this is not working as it should. As Chris said as well 
- the posts are not tagged and are not regular.

Regarding this

>/For outgoing communication, during Kilo (and possibly Juno) we tried
/>/blogging meeting summaries. Did folks notice? Were the posts useful?/

They were not noticed - because they didn't really happen.

>/  We do not always resolve all issues in a week, so we won't
/>/  always have a conclusion to report. Ongoing discussions are tracked
/>/  either here on the mailing list or in gerrit, and I'm not sure we
/>/  want to try to duplicate that information to summarize it./

I do think that a regular update from the TC should be published. Should 
it be very week - probably not - because of the reason above - but at 
least once a month.

Excerpts from Chris Dent's message of 2015-04-27 17:32:12 +0100:
>/  The only way I've been able to get any sense of what the TC might be
/>/  up to is by watching the governance project on gerrit and that tends
/>/  to be too soon and insufficiently summarized and thus a fair bit of
/>/  work to separate the details from the destinations./

If the audience that you are planning on communicating with is: not the 
developers themselves and those who are already heavily involved in the 
community - I think this certainly is not the place to publicize 
changes. Do you seriously expect people who are trying to find 
information (not as a regular code contributor) about what is going on 
to start delving through Gerrit?
Not going to happen.
Does this mean that the TC has to change the way they make decisions? 
The TC should do what what they find works for them. But they also need 
to take into consideration that there are others who are interested in 
the information - but have no idea how to access it.
We need make this more accessible - to those who are not like us.

Excerpts from Chris Dent's message of 2015-04-27 23:20:39 +0100:
>/  _Summaries_ are critical as it is important that the information is
/>/  digested and contextualized so its relevance can be more clear. I
/>/  know that I can read the IRC logs but I suspect most people don't
/>/  want to make the time for that.
/

Amen to that!!

On Tue, 28 Apr 2015, Doug Hellmann wrote:
>OTOH, I'm not sure a strict weekly summary is going to be that
> useful. We do not always resolve all issues in a week, so we won't
> always have a conclusion to report. Ongoing discussions are tracked
> either here on the mailing list or in gerrit, and I'm not sure we
> want to try to duplicate that information to summarize it. So we
> need to find a balance, and I agree that we need to continue posting
> summaries.

Again, Amen to that!

Excerpts from Jeremy Stanley's message of 2015-04-28 16:21:17 +0000:
>/  On 2015-04-28 16:30:21 +0100 (+0100), Chris Dent wrote:
/>/  [...]
/>/  > What's important to avoid is the blog postings being only reporting of
/>/  > "conclusions". They also need to be invitations to participate in the
/>/  > discussions. Yes, the mailing list, gerrit and meeting logs have some
/>/  > of the ongoing discussions but often, without a nudge, people won't
/>/  > know.
/>/  [...]
/>/  
/>/  Perhaps better visibility for the meeting agenda would help? As in
/>/  "these are the major topics we're planning to cover in the upcoming
/>/  meeting, everyone is encouraged to attend" sort of messaging?
/>/  Blogging that might be a bit obnoxious, not really sure (I'm one of
/>/  those luddites who prefer mailing lists to blogs so tend not to
/>/  follow the latter anyway).
/

I am not sure that you want people chiming in every single TC meeting - 
that will become quite chaotic.

Excerpts from Chris Dent's message of Tue Apr 28 15:30:21 UTC 2015

> I'm not trying to suggest that the TC is trying to keep people in
> the dark, rather that it always takes more effort than anyone would
> like to make sure things are lit.

I don't think that anyone is implying that you are saying that the TC is 
keeping it to themselves. I for one would also like to see more 
communication coming out of the TC.
And yes it does take effort.

Excerpts from Chris Dent's message of Tue Apr 28 18:11:44 UTC 2015

> I wouldn't have joined the commentary on the blogging issue if there
> hadn't already been a fair bit of talk about how fixing the feedback
> loop was one of the roads to improving. Also, critically, when Doug
> (who I can see is just trying to point out the current picture of
> reality so I'm not criticizing him, in fact I'd like to laud his
> efforts in pursuit of "write it down" which he has mentioned many
> times) pointed out the existing situation there were, effectively, bugs:
>
> * disconnected taxonomy in the presentation of the blogs
> * misconceptions about the frequency of postings
>
> If we can clear up those preconceptions then we can find the stable
> state from which improvements can be made.
I fully agree!

> It is true that I have dissatisfaction about the visibility of the
> TC and I think a lot of the candidates have made it clear that they
> are concerned with that issue too. That's great!
>
> >/  It is detrimental to our overall electoral process if folks cloak
/> >/  personal points of disagreement in the guise of open discussion.
/>
> I would think that disagreements are in fact exactly the reason for
> having open discussion and such discussion is one of the best ways
> to know where people stand. I didn't, however, have that in mind
> when I responded to clarify things with Doug.
>
I for one would welcome as much open discussion as possible. Of course without any personal attacks.

> Apparently my efforts to be lighthearted about that didn't quite
> play as I planned, and for that I apologize. As I was looking for
> blog postings I found so _few_ that I assumed any statements of
> there's 3 here and 4 over there[1] (covering the last greater than a
> year) were similarly lighthearted. I guess my expectations are way
> off?
>
> >/  I do continue to hope that candidate statements and responses are
/> >/  helpful to the electorate and that they cast their ballot without
/> >/  feeling that doing so is an indication about their feelings regarding a
/> >/  secondary issue.
/>
> I can't let this go without making yet another comment. I feel like
> I should just leave it alone because apparently I'm in deep water
> but: In what fashion is the effectiveness of TC communication a
> "secondary issue"?

> No, we're not going to solve it immediately and really we don't need
> to hash over the policies and procedures of the past. We might,
> however, like to make it better for the future.

I sincerely hope that this will be possible.

-- 
Best Regards,
Maish Saidel-Keesing
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