Open Stack

On Thu, Sep 05, 2019 at 11:59:22AM +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> 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).

I think there was already an effort to allow the PTL to shed some of their
duties, in the form of the Cross Project Liaisons [1] project.  I thought that
was a great way for more junior members of the community to get involved with
stewardship and be recognized for that contribution, and perhaps be mentored up
as they take a bit of load off the PTL.  I think if we expand the roles to
include more of the functions that PTLs feel the need to do themselves, then by
doing so we (of necessity) document those parts of the job so that others can
handle them.  And perhaps projects can cooperate and pool resources - for
example, the same person who is a liaison for Neutron to Oslo could probably be
on the look out for issues of interest to Octavia as well, and so on.

I think that this looks different for projects of different size; large projects
can spread it out a bit, while for smaller ones more of a "triumvirate" approach
would likely develop.

Nate

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CrossProjectLiaisons for those not familiar

> > [...]
> > 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)
>