Open Stack

On Tue, 18 Dec 2018, Zane Bitter wrote:

This is such a great message that I feel obliged to respond, even
though I haven't got much to add. But I will anyway, because I love
email.

> 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.

Agreed.

> 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.

I believe where we went wrong was thinking that people want us to
answer questions. I'm sure there's some desire for that, but I
suspect there are plenty of other people who want us to _do stuff_,
some of which is hard stuff that requires the big talks and major
efforts that come about from reaching consensus through fairly
casual conversation.

> (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.)

Dopamine Ho!

> 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.

Yes.

"Talking about interesting stuff" seems to have tailed off a lot
lately.

-- 
Chris Dent                       ٩◔̯◔۶           https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent