Open Stack

On 05/04/2017 01:10 PM, Flavio Percoco wrote:
<snip>
> Some of the current TC activities depend on the meeting to some extent:
> 
> * We use the meeting to give the final ack on some the formal-vote reviews.
> * Some folks (tc members and not) use the meeting agenda to know what they
>  should be reviewing.
> * Some folks (tc members and not) use the meeting as a way to review or
>  paticipate in active discussions.
> * Some folks use the meeting logs to catch up on what's going on in the TC
> 
> In the resolution that has been proposed[1], we've listed possible
> solutions for
> some of this issues and others:
> 
> * Having office hours
> * Sending weekly updates (pulse) on the current reviews and TC discussions
> 
> Regardless we do this change on one-shot or multiple steps (or don't do
> it at
> all), I believe it requires changing the way TC activities are done:
> 
> * It requires folks (especially TC members) to be more active on reviewing
>  governance patches
> * It requires folks to engage more on the mailing list and start more
>  discussions there.
> 
> Sending this out to kick off a broader discussion on these topics.
> Thoughts?
> Opinions? Objections?

To baseline: I am all in favor of an eventual world to get rid of the TC
IRC meeting (and honestly IRC meetings in general), for all the reasons
listed above.

I shut down my IRC bouncer over a year ago specifically because I think
that the assumption of being on IRC all the time is an anti pattern that
we should be avoiding in our community.

But, that being said, we have a working system right now, one where I
honestly can't remember the last time we had an IRC meeting get to every
topic we wanted to cover and not run into the time limit. That is data
that these needs are not being addressed in other places (yet).

So the concrete steps I would go with is:

1) We need to stop requiring IRC meetings as part of meeting the Open
definition.

That has propagated this issue a lot -
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/462077

2) We really need to stop putting items like the project adds.

That's often forcing someone up in the middle of the night for 15
minutes for no particularly good reason.

3) Don't do interactive reviews in gerrit.

Again, kind of a waste of time that is better in async. It's mostly
triggered by the fact that gerrit doesn't make a good discussion medium
in looking at broad strokes. It's really good about precision feedback,
but broad strokes, it's tough.

One counter suggestion here is to have every governance patch that's not
trivial require that an email come to the list tagged [tc] [governance]
for people to comment more free form here.

4) See what the impact of the summary that Chris is sending out does to
make people feel like they understand what is going on in the meeting.
Because I also think that we make assumptions that the log of the
meeting describes what really happened. And I think that's often an
incorrect assumption. The same words used by Monty, Thierry, Jeremy mean
different things. Which you only know by knowing them all as people.
Having human interpretation of the meeting is good an puts together a
more ingestible narrative for people.


Then evaluate.... because we will know that we need the meeting less (or
less often) when we're regularly ending in 45 minutes, or 30 minutes,
instead of slamming up against the wall with people feeling they had
more to say.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net