[all][elections][ptl] Combined Project Team Lead and Technical Committee Election Conclusion and Results

Thierry Carrez thierry at openstack.org
Thu Sep 5 09:59:22 UTC 2019


Chris Dent wrote:
> [...]
> We need to talk about the fact that there was no opportunity to vote
> in these "elections" (PTL or TC) because there were insufficient
> candidates. No matter the quality of new leaders (this looks like a
> good group), something is amiss.

The reality is, with less hype around OpenStack, it's just harder to 
justify the time you spend on "stewardship" positions. The employer does 
not value having their employees hold those positions as much as they 
used to. That affects things like finding volunteers to officiate 
elections, finding candidates for the TC, and also finding PTLs for 
every project.

As far as PTL/TC elections are concerned I'd suggest two things:

- reduce the number of TC members from 13 to 9 (I actually proposed that 
6 months ago at the PTG but that was not as popular then). A group of 9 
is a good trade-off between the difficulty to get enough people to do 
project stewardship and the need to get a diverse set of opinions on 
governance decision.

- allow "PTL" role to be multi-headed, so that it is less of a 
superhuman and spreading the load becomes more natural. We would not 
elect/choose a single person, but a ticket with one or more names on it. 
 From a governance perspective, we still need a clear contact point and 
a "bucket stops here" voice. But in practice we could (1) contact all 
heads when we contact "the PTL", and (2) consider that as long as there 
is no dissent between the heads, it is "the PTL voice". To actually make 
it work in practice I'd advise to keep the number of heads low (think 1-3).

> [...]
> We drastically need to change the expectations we place on ourselves
> in terms of velocity.

In terms of results, train cycle activity (as represented by merged 
commits/day) is globally down 9.6% compared to Stein. Only considering 
"core" projects, that's down 3.8%.

So maybe we still have the same expectations, but we are definitely 
reducing our velocity... Would you say we need to better align our 
expectations with our actual speed? Or that we should reduce our 
expectations further, to drive velocity further down?

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)



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