Open Stack

Colette Alexander wrote:
> Currently the Stewardship Working Group meetings every other Thursday at
> 1400 UTC. 
> 
> We've had a couple of pings from folks who are interested in joining us
> for meetings that live in US Pacific Time, and that Thursday time isn't
> terribly conducive to them being able to make meetings. So - the
> question is when to move it to, if we can.
> 
> A quick glance at the rest of the Thursday schedule shows the 1500 and
> 1600 time slots available (in #openstack-meeting I believe). I'm
> hesitant to go beyond that in the daytime because we also need to
> accommodate attendees in Western Europe. 
> 
> Thoughts on whether either of those works from SWG members and anyone
> who might like to drop in? We can also look into having meetings once a
> week, and potentially alternating times between the two to help
> accommodate the spread of people.
> 
> Let me know what everyone thinks - and for this week I'll see anyone who
> can make it at 1400 UTC on Thursday.

Alternatively, we could try to come up with ways to avoid regular
meetings altogether. That would certainly be a bit experimental, but the
SWG sounds like a nice place to experiment with more inclusive ways of
coordination.

IMHO meetings serve three purposes. The first is to provide a regular
rhythm and force people to make progress on stated objectives. You give
status updates, lay down actions, make sure nothing is stuck. The second
is to provide quick progress on specific topics -- by having multiple
people around at the same time you can quickly iterate through ideas and
options. The third is to expose an entry point to new contributors: if
they are interested they will look for a meeting to get the temperature
on a workgroup and potentially jump in.

I'm certainly guilty of being involved in too many things, so purpose
(1) is definitely helpful to force me to make regular progress, but it
also feels like something a good status board could do better, and async.

The second purpose is definitely helpful, but I'd say that ad-hoc
meetings (or discussions in a IRC channel) are a better way to achieve
the result. You just need to come up with a one-time meeting point where
all the interested parties will be around, and that's usually easier
than to pick a weekly time that will work for everyone all the time. We
just need to invent tooling that would facilitate organizing and
tracking those.

For the third, I think using IRC channels as the on-boarding mechanism
is more efficient -- meetings are noisy, busy and not so great for
newcomers. If we ramped up channel activity (and generally made IRC
channels more discoverable), I don't think any newcomer would ever use
meetings to "tune in".

Am I missing something that only meetings could ever provide ? If not it
feels like the SWG could experiment with meeting-less coordination by
replacing it with better async status coordination / reminder tools,
some framework to facilitate ad-hoc discussions, and ramping up activity
in IRC channel. If that ends up being successful, we could promote our
techniques to the rest of OpenStack.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)