Open Stack

On 16:16 Sep 16, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Anne Gentle wrote:
> > [...]
> > What are some of the problems with each layer? 
> > 
> > 1. weekly meeting: time zones, global reach, size of cross-project
> > concerns due to multiple projects being affected, another meeting for
> > PTLs to attend and pay attention to
> 
> A lot of PTLs (or liaisons/lieutenants) skip the meeting, or will only
> attend when they have something to ask. Their time is precious and most
> of the time the meeting is not relevant for them, so why bother ? You
> have a few usual suspects attending all of them, but those people are
> cross-project-aware already so those are not the people that would
> benefit the most from the meeting.
> 
> This partial attendance makes the meeting completely useless as a way to
> disseminate information. It makes the meeting mostly useless as a way to
> get general approval on cross-project specs.
> 
> The meeting still is very useful IMHO to have more direct discussions on
> hot topics. So a ML discussion is flagged for direct discussion on IRC
> and we have a time slot already booked for that.

Content for the cross project meeting are usually:

* Not ready for decisions.
* Lack solutions.

A proposal in steps of how cross project ideas start, to something ready for
the cross project IRC meeting, then the TC:

1) An idea starts from either or both:
   a) Mailing list discussion.
   b) A patch to a single project (until it's flagged that this patch could be
      benefical to other projects)
2) OpenStack Spec is proposed - discussions happen in gerrit from here on out.
   Not on the mailing list. Keep encouraging discussions back to gerrit to keep
   everything in one place in order to avoid confusion with having to fish
   for some random discussion elsewhere.
3) Once enough consensus happens an agenda item is posted cross project IRC
   meeting.
4) Final discussions happen in the meeting. If consensus is still met by
   interested parties who attend, it moves to TC.  If there is a lack of
   consensus it goes back to gerrit and repeat.

With this process, we should have less meetings. Less meetings is:

* Awesome
* Makes this meeting more meaningful when it happens because decisions are
  potentially going to be agreed and passed to the TC!

If a cross project spec is not getting attention, don't post it to the list for
attention. We get enough email and it'll probably be lost. Instead, let the
product working group recognize this and reach out to the projects that this
spec would benefit, to bring meaningful attention to the spec.

For vertical alignment, interaction like IRC is not necessary. A very brief,
bullet point of collected information from projects that have anything
interesting is given in a weekly digest email to the list If anyone has
questions or wants more information, they can use their own time to ask that
project team.

Potentially, if we kept everything to the spec on gerrit, and had the product
working group bringing needed attention to specs, we could eliminate the cross
project meeting.

-- 
Mike Perez