Open Stack

On 12/09/15 04:03, Zane Bitter wrote:
> The Heat project pioneered the concept of rotating the PTL for every 
> development cycle, and so far all of the early (before 2013) 
> developers who are still involved have served as PTL. I think this has 
> been a *tremendous* success for the project, and a testament to the 
> sheer depth of leadership talent that we are fortunate to have (as 
> well as, it must be said, to Thierry and the release management team 
> and their ability to quickly bring new people up to speed every 
> cycle). We're already seeing a lot of other projects moving toward the 
> PTL role having a shorter time horizon, and I suspect the main reason 
> they're not moving more rapidly in that direction is that it takes 
> time to build up the expectation of rotating succession and make sure 
> that the leaders within each project are preparing to take their turn. 
> So I like to think that we've been a good influence on the whole 
> OpenStack community in this respect :)
>
> (I'd also note that this expectation is very helpful in terms of 
> spreading the workload around and reducing the amount of work that 
> falls on a single person. To the extent that it is possible to be the 
> PTL of the Heat project and still get some real work done, not just 
> clicking on things in Launchpad - though, be warned, there is still 
> quite a bit of that involved.)
>
> However, there is one area in which we have not yet been as 
> successful: so far all of the PTLs have been folks that were early 
> developers of the project. IMHO it's time for that to change: we have 
> built an amazing team of folks since then who are great leaders in the 
> community and who now have the experience to step up. I can think of 
> at least 4 excellent potential candidates just off the top of my head.
>

Zane is absolutely correct, I only became PTL again because we needed to 
prime the pump for successors. I too can think of many potentials who 
would be more than capable of taking this on for Mitaka and beyond.

One thing about being PTL is that the mindset and habits never leave 
you. Ongoing tasks such as bug triage, stable backports, and keeping the 
gate healthy continue into PTL retirement. In this sense I see a health 
metric of the culture of a project as being how many ex-PTLs continue to 
be engaged with it (leaving aside the many legitimate reasons people may 
have for moving on to other projects).

> Obviously there is a time commitment involved - in fact Flavio's 
> entire blog post[1] is great and you should definitely read that first 
> - but if you are already devoting a majority of your time to the 
> upstream Heat project and you think this is likely to be sustainable 
> for the next 6 months, then please run for PTL!
>
> (You may safely infer from this that I won't be running this time.)
>
(And neither will I :)