Open Stack

On Oct 4, 2016, at 11:54 AM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:

>> In French, "prétendre" has a connotation of "profess" or simply
>> "say", which is very different from the more negative connotation
>> of "pretend" in English where common use implies some false intent.
>> Knowing Thierry and his past contributions well enough to trust his
>> good intentions, I was able to look past the awkward phrasing to
>> ask what message he was trying to convey.
> 
> Yeah, sorry for the poor choice of words, I didn't mean that candidates
> are trying to deceive anyone. I only meant that in my experience, past
> members of the TC were overly optimistic in their campaign emails about
> how much they thought they would be able to achieve. So looking at the
> past track record is important.

A great example of knowing the person. It sounded harsh to me when I read it, too, but knowing Thierry so well, I understood the intent. Had that been an anonymous comment, I wouldn’t have made that mental adjustment.

So maybe anonymous isn’t the way to go. But we really do need to do several things:

1) Allow time between the nominations and the voting. Half of the candidates don’t announce until the last day or two, and that doesn’t leave very much time to get to know them.

2) I like the idea of identifying the issues that the people of OpenStack care about, and having every candidate give their answers. One thing I worry about, though, is the time zone difference. Candidate A publishes their answers early, and gets a lot of reaction. Candidate Z, in a later timezone, publishes their answers after the discussions have played out already. Let’s release the answers all at once.

3) We need to find a way to at least *reduce* the effect of incumbency. Not that I have any particular incumbent in mind, of course, but any group of people gets set in their ways unless the membership changes regularly.

And let me reiterate: I’m a candidate for the TC, and not an incumbent. So of course this seems a bit self-serving, especially to an outsider who might not know me very well. But I’m sure that Thierry and Doug and others, who have known me for many years, understand my intent: to keep improving OpenStack.


-- Ed Leafe