Open Stack

On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 11:46 AM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Last year in Ann Arbor, a group of OpenStack community members
> (including 6 current TC members) attended a Servant Leadership training
> at ZingTrain organized by Colette Alexander and funded by the OpenStack
> Foundation. We found that these concepts adapted quite well to our
> unique environment. The Stewardship working group was created to try to
> further those and decided to further those efforts. One of the tools we
> learned about there is the concept of building a "vision" to define a
> desirable future for a group of people, and to inform future choices on
> our way there.
>
> In any virtual and global community, there are challenges around
> confusion, isolation and fragmentation. OpenStack does not escape those,
> and confusion on where we are going and what we are trying to achieve is
> common. Vision is a tool that can help with that. We decided to start
> with creating a vision for the Technical Committee. What would success
> for that group of people look like ? If that exercise is successful (and
> useful), we could move on to write a vision for OpenStack itself.
>
> Members of the Technical Committee met in person around a Board+TC
> meeting in Boston last month, to start building this vision. Then over
> the last month we refined this document with the TC members that could
> not make it in person in Boston. Sean Dague polished the wording and
> posted the resulting draft at:
>
> https://review.openstack.org/#/c/453262/
>
> Now we are entering a (long) comment phase. This includes comments on
> the review, face-to-face discussions at the Forum, but also (soon) an
> open survey for confidential feedback. We'd very much like to hear your
> opinion on it.

Thanks for sharing this Thierry, and thanks to everyone putting it together.

As many others, I have received the survey asking for feedback, and
I've also taken a look at the Gerrit change and the ensuing discussion
there. I am not sure whether Gerrit is the appropriate place to make
the following comment, so I'm taking the liberty to post this here.

This is a vision that is set out for the next couple of years. Taking
into account the size (and thus inherent inertia) of the OpenStack
community, I wonder if the goals staked out in the vision are in any
way realistic to achieve in the time allotted.

To me, it looks more like a 5-year vision than a 2-year one. In other
words, the changes staked out, to me, are more comparable to what
happened in OpenStack between 2012 and now, not between 2015 and now,
and so I have my doubts about how they would fit between now and 2019.

Now I have absolutely no objections to aiming high, and many goals in
the vision are entirely worthy of pursuit. But if you were to set out
to do something that is fundamentally infeasible in the time allotted,
then all you'd be heading for is frustration. In fact, it would run
the risk of largely discounting the vision as a whole — people are far
less likely to buy into something where compared to what is staked
out, the realistic expectation is to achieve maybe half of it, or to
take twice the time. I think this vision runs a considerable risk of
that.

I wasn't at the leadership training and I don't know what was
discussed there. So I'm wondering if you could share whether this was
a topic of discussion, and whether perhaps people spoke up and said
that this is more of a five year plan that should now be broken down
into achievable goals with a time frame of 1-2 years each.

Thank you!

Cheers,
Florian