Open Stack

On 18/12/18 5:58 AM, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> writes:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> A while ago, the Technical Committee designated specific hours in the
>> week where members would make extra effort to be around on #openstack-tc
>> on IRC, so that community members looking for answers to their questions
>> or wanting to engage can find a time convenient for them and a critical
>> mass of TC members around. We currently have 3 weekly spots:
>>
>> - 09:00 UTC on Tuesdays
>> - 01:00 UTC on Wednesdays
>> - 15:00 UTC on Thursdays
>>
>> But after a few months it appears that:
>>
>> 1/ nobody really comes on channel at office hour time to ask questions.
>> We had a questions on the #openstack-tc IRC channel, but I wouldn't say
>> people take benefit of the synced time
>>
>> 2/ some office hours (most notably the 01:00 UTC on Wednesdays, but also
>> to a lesser extent the 09:00 UTC on Tuesdays) end up just being a couple
>> of TC members present
>>
>> So the schedule is definitely not reaching its objectives, and as such
>> may be a bit overkill. I was also wondering if this is not a case where
>> the offer is hurting the demand -- by having so many office hour spots
>> around, nobody considers them special.
>>
>> Should we:
>>
>> - Reduce office hours to one or two per week, possibly rotating times
>>
>> - Dump the whole idea and just encourage people to ask questions at any
>> time on #openstack-tc, and get asynchronous answers
>>
>> - Keep it as-is, it still has the side benefit of triggering spikes of
>> TC member activity
>>
>> Thoughts ?
>>
>> -- 
>> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>>
> 
> I would like for us to make a decision about this.
> 
> The 0100 Wednesday meeting was generally seen as a good candidate to
> drop, if we do drop one. No one seemed to support the idea of rotating
> meeting times, so I'm going to eliminate that from consideration. We can
> discuss the idea of changing the schedule of the meetings separately
> from how many we want to have, so I will also postpone that question for
> later.
> 
> TC members, please respond to this thread indicating your support for
> one of these options:
> 
> 1. Keep the 3 fixed office hours.
> 2. Drop the 0100 Wednesday meeting, keeping the other 2.
> 3. Drop all office hours.

Of those options I think I have to vote for 1. The 0100 Wednesday is 
(temporarily) the only one I can actually attend, so I'm in favour of 
keeping it. I'm also deeply sceptical that having fewer office hours 
will boost interest.

TBH I'm not actually sure I know what we are trying to achieve at this 
point. When the TC started office hours it was as a more 
time-zone-friendly replacement for the weekly meeting. And the weekly 
meeting was mainly used for discussion amongst the TC members and those 
folks who consistently follow the TC's activity (many of whom are 
hopefully future TC candidates - the fact that largely only folks from 
certain time zones were joining this group was the problematic part of 
meetings to my mind). However, recently we've been saying that the 
purpose of office hours is to bring in folks who aren't part of that 
group to ask questions, and that the folks who are in the group should 
actively avoid discussion in order to not discourage them. Then we are 
surprised when things are quiet.

Is there actually any reason to think that there is a problematic level 
of under-reporting of TC-escalation-worthy issues? I can't think an a 
priori reason to expect that in a healthy project there should be large 
numbers of issues escalated to the TC. And despite focusing our meeting 
strategy around that and conducting a massively time-consuming campaign 
of reaching out to teams individually via the health checks, I'm not 
seeing any empirical evidence of it either. Meanwhile there's ample 
evidence that we need more time to discuss things as a group - just 
witness the difficulty of getting through a monthly meeting in < 1 hour 
by trying to stick to purely procedural stuff.

(A more cynical person than I might suggest that going searching for 
trivial issues that we can 'solve' by fiat offers a higher 
dopamine-to-time-spent ratio than working together as a team to do... 
anything at all, and that this may explain some of its popularity.)

IMHO our goal should be - like every other team's - to grow the group of 
people around the TC who form the 'governance team' for which the TC 
members are effectively the core reviewers, and from which we expect to 
find our next generation of TC members. While doing that, we must try to 
ensure that we're not structurally limiting the composition of the group 
by longitude. But I don't think we'll get there by trying to be quiet so 
they can speak up - we'll get there by being present and talking about 
interesting stuff that people want to join in on. If there's a problem 
with casual contributors making themselves heard, provide them with a 
way to get their topic on an informal agenda (or encourage them to begin 
on the mailing list) and make sure it gets raised during office hours so 
they are not drowned out.

I might support rejigging the times and dropping to twice a week if I 
thought that it meant a majority of the TC would show up each time and 
discussions would actually happen (we had an etherpad of topics at some 
point that I haven't seen in a long time). In that case I would even 
join the 10pm session if necessary to participate, though we should 
recognise that for folks from this part of the world who *don't* have a 
formal role that's a massive obstacle.

cheers,
Zane.