Open Stack

Rico Lin <rico.lin.guanyu at gmail.com> writes:

> (Put my whatever hat on)
> Here's my suggestion, we can either make a patch to clarify the process
> step by step (no exception) or simply move everything out of
> https://governance.openstack.org/tc
> That actually leads to the current discussion here, to just use versions or
> not. Personally, I'm interested in improving the document and not that much
> interested in making only versions. I do like to see if we can use whatever
> alphabet we like so this version can be *cool*, and the next version can be
> *awesome*.  Isn't that sounds cool and awesome? :)

I'm happy to help improve it if that's what folks want.  I already think
it says what you and several other people want it to say.  But I wrote
it, and so the fact that people keep reading it and coming away with
different understandings means I did a bad job.  So I'll need help to
figure out which parts I wasn't clear on.

But I'm serious about the suggestion to scrap names altogether.  Every
time we have an issue with this, it's because people start making their
own judgments when the job of the coordinator is basically just to send
some emails.

The process is 7 very clear steps.  Many of them were definitely not
followed this time.  We can try to make it more clear, but we have done
that before, and it still didn't prevent things from going wrong this
time.

As a community, we just don't care enough to get it right, and getting
it wrong only produces bad feelings and wastes all our time.  I'm
looking forward to OpenStack Release 22.

That sounds cool.  That's a big number.  Way bigger than like 1.x.

> And like the idea
> Chris Dent propose to just use *U* or *V*, etc. to save us from having to
> have this discussion again(I'm actually the one to propose *U* in the list
> this time:) )

That would solve a lot of problems, and create one new one in a few
years. :)

> And if we're going to use any new naming system, I strongly suggest we
> should remove the *Geographic Region* constraint if we plan to have a poll.
> It's always easy to find conflict between what local people think about the
> name and what the entire community thinks about it.

We will have a very long list if we do that.

I'm not sure I agree with you about that problem though.  In practice,
deciding whether a river is within a state boundary is not that
contentious.  That's pretty much all that's ever been asked.

> (Put my official hat on)
> And for the problem of *University* part:
> back in the proposal period, I find a way to add *University* back to the
> meet criteria list so hope people get to discuss whether or not it can be
> in the poll. And (regardless for the ongoing discussion about whether or
> not TC got any role to govern this process) I did turn to TCs and ask for
> the advice for the final answer (isn't that is the responsibility for TCs
> to guide?), so I guess we can say I'm the one to remove it out of the final
> list. Therefore I'm taking the responsibility to say I'm the one to omit
> *University*.

Thanks.  I don't fault you personally for this, I think we got into this
situation because no one wanted to do it and so a confusing set of
people on the TC ended up performing various tasks ad-hoc.  That you
stepped up and took action and responsibility is commendable.  You have
my respect for that.

I do think the conversation about University could have been more clear.
Specific yes/no answers and reasons would have been nice.  Instead of a
single decision about whether it was included, I received 3 decisions
with 4 rationales from several different people.  Either of the
following would have been perfectly fine outcomes:

Me: Can has University, plz?
Coordinator: Violates criterion 4
Me: But Pike
Coordinator: Questionable, but process says be "generous"
             so, okay, it's in.
or
Coordinator: <Insert reason pike is invalid precedent>.  Sorry, it's
             still out.

However, reasons around trademark or the suitability of English words
are not appropriate reasons to exclude a name.  Nor is "the TC didn't
like it".  There is only one reason to exclude a name, and that is that
it violates one of the 4 criteria.

Of course it's fine to ask the TC, or anyone else for guidance.
However, it's clear from the IRC log that many members of the TC did not
appreciate what was being asked of them.  It would be okay to ask them
"Do you think this meets the criteria?"  But instead, a long discussion
about whether the names were *good choices* ensued.  That's not one of
the steps in the process.  In fact, it's the exact thing that the
process is supposed to avoid.  No matter what the members of the TC
thought about whether a name was a good idea, if it met the criteria it
should be in.

> During the process, we omitted Ujenn, Uanjou, Ui, Uanliing, Ueihae, Ueishan
> from the meet criteria list because they're not the most popular spelling
> system in China. And we omitted Urumqi from the meet criteria list because
> of the potential political issue. Those are before I was an official. And
> we should consider them all during discuss about *University* here. I guess
> we should define more about in which stage should the official propose the
> final list of all names that meet criteria should all automatically be part
> of the final list.

None of those should have been removed.  They, even more so than
University, clearly meet the criteria, and were only removed due to
personal preference.

I want to be clear, there *is* a place for consideration of all of these
things.  That is step 3:

  The marketing community may identify any names of particular concern
  from a marketing standpoint and discuss such issues publicly on the
  Marketing mailing list. The marketing community may produce a list of
  problematic items (with citations to the mailing list discussion of
  the rationale) to the election official. This information will be
  communicated during the election, but the names will not be removed
  from the poll.

That is where we would identify things like "this name uses an unusual
romanization system" or "this name has political ramifications".  We
don't remove those names from the list, but we let the community know
about the issues, so that when people vote, they have all the
information.

We trust our community to make good (or hilariously bad) decisions.

That's what this all comes down to.  The process as written is supposed
to collect a lot of names, with a lot of information, and present them
to our community and let us all decide together.  That's what has been
lost.

-Jim