Open Stack

On 6/21/2017 9:59 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> One of the areas identified as a priority by the Board + TC + UC
> workshop in March was the need to better close the feedback loop and
> make unanswered requirements emerge. Part of the solution is to ensure
> that groups that look at specific use cases, or specific problem spaces
> within OpenStack get participation from a wide spectrum of roles, from
> pure operators of OpenStack clouds, to upstream developers, product
> managers, researchers, and every combination thereof. In the past year
> we reorganized the Design Summit event, so that the design / planning /
> feedback gathering part of it would be less dev- or ops-branded, to
> encourage participation of everyone in a neutral ground, based on the
> topic being discussed. That was just a first step.
> 
> In OpenStack we have a number of "working groups", groups of people
> interested in discussing a given use case, or addressing a given problem
> space across all of OpenStack. Examples include the API working group,
> the Deployment working group, the Public clouds working group, the
> Telco/NFV working group, or the Scientific working group. However, for
> governance reasons, those are currently set up either as a User
> Committee working group[1], or a working group depending on the
> Technical Committee[2]. This branding of working groups artificially
> discourages participation from one side to the others group, for no
> specific reason. This needs to be fixed.
> 
> We propose to take a page out of Kubernetes playbook and set up "SIGs"
> (special interest groups), that would be primarily defined by their
> mission (i.e. the use case / problem space the group wants to
> collectively address). Those SIGs would not be Ops SIGs or Dev SIGs,
> they would just be OpenStack SIGs. While possible some groups will lean
> more towards an operator or dev focus (based on their mission), it is
> important to encourage everyone to join in early and often. SIGs could
> be very easily set up, just by adding your group to a wiki page,
> defining the mission of the group, a contact point and details on
> meetings (if the group has any). No need for prior vetting by any
> governance body. The TC and UC would likely still clean up dead SIGs
> from the list, to keep it relevant and tidy. Since they are neither dev
> or ops, SIGs would not use the -dev or the -operators lists: they would
> use a specific ML (openstack-sigs ?) to hold their discussions without
> cross-posting, with appropriate subject tagging.
> 
> Not everything would become a SIG. Upstream project teams would remain
> the same (although some of them, like Security, might turn into a SIG).
> Teams under the UC that are purely operator-facing (like the Ops Tags
> Team or the AUC recognition team) would likewise stay as UC subteams.
> 
> Comments, thoughts ?
> 
> [1]
> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/UserCommittee#Working_Groups_and_Teams
> [2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Upstream_Working_Groups
> 

How does the re-branding or re-categorization of these groups solve the 
actual feedback problem? If the problem is getting different people from 
different groups together, how does this solve that? For example, how do 
we get upstream developers aware of operator issues or product managers 
communicating their needs and feature priorities to the upstream 
developers? No one can join all work groups or SIGs and be aware of all 
things at the same time, and actually have time to do anything else.

Is the number of various work groups/SIGs a problem?

Maybe what I'd need is an example of an existing problem case and how 
the new SIG model would fix that - concrete examples would be really 
appreciated when communicating suggested governance changes.

For example, is there some feature/requirement/issue that one group has 
wanted implemented/fixed for a long time but another group isn't aware 
of it? How would SIGs fix that in a way that work groups haven't?

-- 

Thanks,

Matt