Open Stack

On 10/03/2016 11:30 AM, gordon chung wrote:
> hi,
> 
> as there are many candidates this TC election, i figured i'd ask a 
> question to better understand the candidates from the usual sales pitch 
> in self-nominations. hopefully, this will give some insights into the 
> candidates for those who haven't voted yet. obviously, the following is 
> completely optional. :)
> 
> i initially asked this to John Dickinson[1] in his self-nomination. i'd 
> like to open this up to everyone. the (re-worded) question is:
> 
> the TC has historically been a reactive council that lets others ask for 
> change and acts as the final approver. do you believe the TC should be a 
> proactive committee that initiates change and if yes, to what scope? 
> more generally, what are some specific issues you'd like the TC address 
> in the coming year?
> 
> [1] 
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-September/104821.html
> 
> thanks,
> 

Does a committee initiate change? or do dedicated individuals? I feel
like there are a ton of dedicated individuals within our community (many
on the TC, but 13 slots is not enough to cover how many dedicated folks
there are). They are constantly doing hard and good work to make our
community move forward.

I feel like the role of the TC, as a group that votes and controls the
governance, is mostly about making sure that all these really great
efforts aren't negatively impacting the long term viability of the
OpenStack community. The TC really is stewards of that community. The
community is what produces the software we have, supports our users, and
helps mentor folks into the environment.

There is tons of work to be done in Open Stack. Probably 80% of it is
non controversial. I often feel like the implicit part of the ask is
that the energy of the folks on the TC is spent on the most
controversial 5%, where our plurality shows, and we as a community are
not of one mind. It assumes that where we disagree is the most important
parts of how the community moves forward. But that's often not true.
Often the thing holding us back isn't that, it's other things where we
see folks struggling.

A couple of good instances that I've been involved in are things like
the devstack plugin interface, where lots of projects needed to build
their own custom full stack environments, way more than devstack code
support in tree. A few of us identified the friction, came up with a
solution, brought it to the community. The same with the recent API ref
effort. There was huge friction around API documentation, that meant our
users basically had to read our source code to write an application. At
which point the API is nearly pointless. A couple of us (2 from the TC)
identified the issue, spitballed options, figured out a path forward.
And it's been a huge success.

Now, people may say, those don't sound like giant strategic sweeping
direction changes. And they aren't. We we have to be careful not to
assume that flashy controversial work is the most important work to be
done. We're trying to building an ecosystem here. And an ecosystem isn't
just pretty flowers, and juicy tomatoes. It's grubs, and dirt, and
compost, and weeds, and worms, and bees, and lots of hard work creating
fertile soil to get the best results.

Ok, so there are still controversial issues, which we do need to have a
way through. Handling those kind of issues requires trust and the
benefit of the doubt. At times, recently, it doesn't feel like we have
enough of it. One thought I have had about moving us forward is to take
some time this next cycle on visions of OpenStack. Not a top down
version of this, but a TC led exercise where we get lots of people in
our community to write down their visions, and feel safe doing it. This
was really how we got to the Big Tent. At the time there was a bit of
deriding about "all the blogs" where people were expressing themselves.
But it was a really useful exercise, because you got lots of
perspectives out there. And, it turns out, they agreed on about 80% of
the changes we needed, and where we didn't agree we were able to move
forward knowing we were looking at shades of the same thing.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic there, but we as a community also need to
realize the amazing thing that we've built so far. And the fact that
we've build a community that is going strong, despite many of the
founding members having moved on.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net