Open Stack

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Dent [mailto:cdent+os at anticdent.org]
> Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2016 7:19 AM
> To: OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> Subject: [openstack-dev] [all] governance proposal worth a visit: Write
> down OpenStack principles
> 
> 
> There's a governance proposal in progress at
> https://review.openstack.org/#/c/357260/ that I think is worth a
> visit by anyone interested in the definition and evolution of
> OpenStack's identity and the processes and guidelines used in OpenStack.
> 
> I'm assuming that not everyone regularly cruises the governance
> project so this thing, which is pretty important, has probably not
> been seen yet by many community members. It is full of many
> assertions, some probably controversial, about what OpenStack is and
> what we get up to.
> 
> At the moment a lot of the reviews are obsessing over the details and
> interpretations of various phrases and paragraphs. This is in
> preparation for a later presentation to the community that ought to
> engender a long email thread where we will discuss it and try to ratify.
> I fear that discussion will also obsess over the details.
> 
> The ordering here is backwards from a process that could be happening if
> what we want is effective engagement and a useful outcome (one where we
> agree). We should first have a conversation about the general principles
> that are desired, then capture those into a document and only then
> obsess over the details. The current process will inevitably privilege
> the existing text and thus the bias of the authors[1].

[amrith] Chris, I do not have the longer history that you have with OpenStack and therefore my comments below reflect this shorter tenure with the project.

I believe that there are two things that have motivated the writing of these documents at this stage. The first is a realization that the project has evolved organically and there are many things that are explicitly documented (rules for election of the TC, PTL's, ...) but there are equally well some other important things that are not documented.

Sitting in a room with a bunch of people in Ann Arbor, listening to the conversations at TC meetings on IRC, I got the impression that there were many fundamental things that people in the community did not have a common shared understanding about. I'm not implying that they were polar opposites, in many cases they were merely shades of gray, a few degrees apart. But yes, there were some where the impressions were certainly more divergent than others.

One of the core concepts that came out of the session(s) we had at Ann Arbor, and central to the theme of the leadership style that we were exposed to by the Zingerman's folks was the notion that an organization works effectively only when all people in the organization share a common set of values, principles, and goals.

It was in this context that after two days of hearing about this, that there was a collective belief that it would be good to get that shared common set of values, principles and goals for OpenStack. Now, that's a huge task and one small aspect of that was to write down some of the things that we felt were the OpenStack principles.

And I think that the writing down of these things has spurred a very important debate that has surfaced the fact that there are many different points of view expressed in the review, and in various email threads, about what these 'principles' really are.

Are we one OpenStack or not, is a good example.

I agree with you, it is important for all of us to visit these reviews as you suggest in your email.

Let me just make one other point, you write:

> I fear that discussion will also obsess over the details.

Within reason, I don't think this is bad. The devil is, literally, in the details.

> 
> I presume that the process that is happening was chosen to avoid too
> much bikeshedding. The issue with that is that the work we need to
> do is stepping back a bit and concerning ourselves not with the color of
> the shed, but with whether it is for bikes, or even a shed. Last we
> talked about it, it was a tent, but there's no consensus that that is
> going well.
> 
> [1] I don't wish to indicate that there's anything wrong (or right!)
> about the current text, simply that it is a presentation of a few
> authors, including some written in the past, not a summary of an open
> discussion in the present day.
> 
> --
> Chris Dent               ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)        https://anticdent.org/
> freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent