[openstack-dev] Avoiding regression in project governance

Russell Bryant rbryant at redhat.com
Tue Mar 10 16:29:45 UTC 2015


The TC is in the middle of implementing a fairly significant change in
project governance.  You can find an overview from Thierry on the
OpenStack blog [1].

Part of the change is to recognize more projects as being part of the
OpenStack community.  Another critical part was replacing the integrated
release with a set of tags.  A project would be given a tag if it meets
some defined set of criteria.

I feel that we're at a very vulnerable part of this transition.  We've
abolished the incubation process and integrated release.  We've
established a fairly low bar for new projects [2].  However, we have not
yet approved *any* tags other than the one that reflects which projects
are included in the final integrated release (Kilo) [3].  Despite the
previously discussed challenges with the integrated release,
it did at least mean that a project has met a very useful set of
criteria [4].

We now have several new project proposals.  However, I propose not
approving any new projects until we have a tagging system that is at
least far enough along to represent the set of criteria that we used to
apply to all OpenStack projects (with exception for ones we want to
consciously drop).  Otherwise, I think it's a significant setback to our
project governance as we have yet to provide any useful way to navigate
the growing set of projects.

The resulting set of tags doesn't have to be focused on replicating our
previous set of criteria.  The focus must be on what information is
needed by various groups of consumers and tags are a mechanism to
implement that.  In any case, we're far from that point because today we
have nothing.

I can't think of any good reason to rush into approving projects in the
short term.  If we're not able to work out this rich tagging system in a
reasonable amount of time, then maybe the whole approach is broken and
we need to rethink the whole approach.

Thanks,

[1] http://www.openstack.org/blog/2015/02/tc-update-project-reform-progress/
[2] http://governance.openstack.org/reference/new-projects-requirements.html
[3] http://governance.openstack.org/reference/tags/index.html
[4]
http://governance.openstack.org/reference/incubation-integration-requirements.html

-- 
Russell Bryant



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