Open Stack

Excerpts from Thierry Carrez's message of 2015-11-09 13:52:11 +0100:
> Doug Hellmann wrote:
> > One thing I forgot to mention in my original email was the discussion
> > about when we would have this themes conversation for the N cycle.
> > I had originally hoped we would discuss the themes online before
> > the summit, and that those would inform decisions about summit
> > sessions. Several other folks in the room made the point that we
> > were unlikely to come up with a theme so surprising that we would
> > add or drop a summit session from any existing planning, so having
> > the discussion in person at the summit to add background to the
> > other sessions for the week was more constructive.
> 
> So I was stuck in Design Summit 101 during this session and couldn't
> attend. Saying that discussing common themes before summit planning is
> unlikely to change design summit session contents strikes me as odd.
> That's equivalent to saying that the right themes are picked anyway.
> That may be the case for some projects, but certainly not the case for
> all projects, otherwise we wouldn't be having that discussion to begin
> with...
> 
> Personally I think we need to have the cycle themes discussion before
> the design summit so that it can really influence what gets discussed
> there and ends up in real action items. Adding background at the last
> minute to already-decided session topics is just not enough to trigger
> real progress in those key areas.
> 
> Why can't we have that discussion on the ML in the second half of the
> cycle, between the midcycle sprints and the summit planning ?
> 

I think their point was that the themes we were coalescing on had
already been discussed in different forums, and since most of them
were "background" themes (stabilization, functional testing, etc.)
that didn't require much discussion to reach agreement they would
be unlikely to trigger summit sessions. In the future, that might
not be the case, though.

I'll be raising the theme issue several times during milestone
retrospectives, so we may identify new themes out of those discussions.
As we get closer to the end of the cycle, some more explicit time spent
brainstorming themes might make sense, too.

Doug