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Hi Thierry, thanks for raising it. I think it's very important to discuss indeed.

On 05/18/2017 11:27 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> For the PTG events we have a number of rooms available for 5 days, of
> which we need to make the best usage. We also want to keep it simple and
> productive, so we want to minimize room changes (allocating the same
> room to the same group for one or more days).
> 
> For the first PTG in Atlanta, we split the week into two groups.
> Monday-Tuesday for "horizontal" project team meetups (Infra, QA...) and
> workgroups (API WG, Goals helprooms...), and Wednesday-Friday for
> "vertical" project team meetups (Nova, Swift...). This kinda worked, but
> the feedback we received called for more optimizations and reduced
> conflicts.
> 
> In particular, some projects which have a lot of contributors overlap
> (Storlets/Swift, or Manila/Cinder) were all considered "vertical" and
> happened at the same time. Also horizontal team members ended up having
> issues to attend workgroups, and had nowhere to go for the rest of the
> week. Finally, on Monday-Tuesday the rooms that had the most success
> were inter-project ones we didn't really anticipate (like the API WG),
> while rooms with horizontal project team meetups were a bit
> under-attended. While we have a lot of constraints, I think we can
> optimize a bit better.
> 
> After giving it some thought, my current thinking is that we should
> still split the week in two, but should move away from an arbitrary
> horizontal/vertical split. My strawman proposal would be to split the
> week between inter-project work (+ teams that rely mostly on liaisons in
> other teams) on Monday-Tuesday, and team-specific work on Wednesday-Friday:
> 
> Example of Monday-Tuesday rooms:
> Interop WG, Docs, QA, API WG, Packaging WG, Oslo, Goals helproom,
> Infra/RelMgt/support teams helpdesk, TC/SWG room, VM&BM Working group...
> 
> Example of Wednesday-Thursday or Wednesday-Friday rooms:
> Nova, Cinder, Neutron, Swift, TripleO, Kolla, Infra...

Two objections here:

1. In Atlanta moving cross-project things to the first 2 day resulted in a big 
share of people arriving on Tuesday and just skipping it. This is partly because 
of budget, partly because they did not associate themselves with any 
cross-project group. I wonder if we should motivate people to participate in at 
least some of these by moving one of the days to the middle of the week.

2. Doing TripleO in parallel to other projects was quite unfortunate IMO. 
TripleO is an integration project. I would love TripleO people to come to Ironic 
sessions, and I'd like to attend TripleO sessions myself. It is essentially 
impossible with this suggestions.

> 
> (NB: in this example infra team members end up being available in a
> general support team helpdesk room in the first part of the week, and
> having a regular team meetup on the second part of the week)
> 
> In summary, Monday-Tuesday would be mostly around themes, while
> Wednesday-Friday would be mostly around teams. In addition to that,
> teams that /prefer/ to run on Monday-Tuesday to avoid conflicting with
> another project meetup (like Manila wanting to avoid conflicting with
> Cinder, or Storlets wanting to avoid conflicting with Swift) could
> *choose* to go for Monday-Tuesday instead of Wednesday-Friday.
> 
> It's a bit of a long shot (we'd still want to equilibrate both sides in
> terms of room usage, so it's likely that the teams that are late to
> decide to participate would be pushed on one side or the other), but I
> think it's a good incremental change that could solve some of the issues
> reported in the Atlanta week slicing, as well as generally make
> inter-project coordination simpler.
> 
> If we adopt that format, we need to be pretty flexible in terms of what
> is a "workgroup": to me, any inter-project work that would like to have
> a one-day or two-day room should be able to get some.
> Nova-{Cinder,Neutron,Ironic} discussions would for example happen in the
> VM & BM working group room, but we can imagine others just like it.

Big +1 to being flexible in defining work groups. Actually, we had to organize 
Ironic-Neutron room anyway on Monday. The only problem, as I note above, is that 
many people may opt out of being there on Mon-Tue.

> 
> Let me know what you think. Also feel free to propose alternate creative
> ways to slice the space and time we'll have. We need to open
> registration very soon (June 1st is the current target), and we'd like
> to have a rough idea of the program before we do that (so that people
> can report which days they will attend more accurately).
>