Open Stack

Excerpts from Jonathan Bryce's message of 2017-03-01 11:49:38 -0600:
> 
> > On Feb 28, 2017, at 4:25 AM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Clint Byrum wrote:
> >>>> So, I'll ask more generally: do you believe that the single openstack-dev
> >>>> mailing list is working fine and we should change nothing? If not, what
> >>>> problems has it created for you? 
> >>> 
> >>> As a person who sends a lot of process-driven email to this list,
> >>> it is not working for my needs to communicate with others.
> >>> 
> >>> Over the past few cycles when I was the release PTL, I always had
> >>> a couple of PTLs say there was too much email on this list for them
> >>> to read, and that they had not read my instructions for managing
> >>> releases. That resulted in us having to train folks at the last
> >>> minute, remind them of deadlines, deal with them missing deadlines,
> >>> and otherwise increased the release team's workload.
> >>> 
> >>> It is possible the situation will improve now that the automation
> >>> work is mostly complete and we expect to see fewer significant
> >>> changes in the release workflow. That still leaves quite a few
> >>> people regularly surprised by deadlines, though.
> >> 
> >> The problem above is really the krux of it. Whether or not you can keep
> >> up with the mailing list can be an unknown, unknown. Even now, those
> >> who can't actually handle the mailing list traffic are in fact likely
> >> missing this thread about whether or not people can handle the mailing
> >> list traffic (credit fungi for pointing out this irony to me on IRC).
> > 
> > Right, the main issue (for me) is that there is no unique way to reach
> > out to people that you're 100% sure they will read. For some the miracle
> > solution will be a personal email, for some it will be an IRC ping, for
> > some it will be a Twitter private message. There is no 100% sure
> > solution, and everyone prioritizes differently. The burden of reaching
> > out and making sure the message was acknowledged is on the person who
> > sends the message, and that just doesn't scale past 50 teams. That
> > includes release team communications to PTLs, but also things like
> > election nomination deadlines and plenty of other things.
> 
> Clint asked if there were specific issues in the workflow, and one item both Thierry and Doug have identified is reaching ALL project leaders consistently with important notifications or requests. I have also seen some working group leaders and Foundation staff experience similar difficulties. Perhaps creating a business-oriented list for PTLs similar to docs/infra that could help with that particular problem.

Agreed. I think I may have even missed the krux of the reason for
the business lists, which was more "how do we get an important signal
through".

IMO this is where the announcement list would be useful. But that has
become something else entirely with release notifications (or it hasn't,
I don't know, I dropped it). But generally projects do have a low
traffic higher-priority list for announcements.