Open Stack

Hi all,

When our current project governance was established in 2012, we defined 
two separate bodies. The Technical Committee represented developers / 
code contributors to the open source project(s), while the User 
Committee represented the operators running the resulting software, as 
well as users of the APIs.

That setup served us well in those early days. The focus on the upstream 
side was strongly around *development* of code, we did not have that 
many users, and even less users directly involved in upstream 
development. A separate User Committee resulted in the formation of an 
engaged community of users, and ensured that our community in general 
(and our events in particular) took the needs of operators into account.

Fast-forward to 2020: the upstream focus is more on maintenance. We now 
have a lot of users, and thanks to the efforts of the UC they are 
increasingly directly involved in the open source project development, 
with several operators leading upstream project teams directly. There is 
now limited UC-specific activity, and as such it is struggling to get 
volunteers to step up for it: nobody nominated themselves for the last 
round of election.

Keeping two separate bodies to represent them maintains the illusion 
that devs and ops are different breeds, and sometimes discourages 
operators from running for the TC and more directly influence the shape 
of the software. If anything, we need more ops representation at the TC, 
and seeing people like mnaser being elected at (and chairing) the TC was 
a great experience. I discussed the situation with the current UC 
members, and we decided it's time to consider having a single 
"community" and a single body to represent it.

That body would tackle the traditional TC tasks (open source project 
governance and stewardship) but also the UC tasks (user survey, 
ambassador program...). That body would be elected by contributors, in a 
large sense that includes the AUC definition. I feel like that would 
help remove the artificial barriers discouraging users to get more 
directly involved with software development and maintenance.

There are multiple ways to achieve that, in increasing order of 
complexity and bylaws changes needed:

1- No bylaws change
As bylaws changes take a lot of time and energy, the simplest approach 
would be to merge the TC and UC without changing the bylaws at all. The 
single body (called TC) would incorporate the AUC criteria by adding all 
AUC members as extra-ATC. It would tackle all aspects of our community. 
To respect the letter of the bylaws, the TC would formally designate 5 
of its members to be the 'UC' and those would select a 'UC chair'. But 
all tasks would be handled together.

2- Minimal bylaws change
Same, but all mentions of the UC would be removed from the bylaws 
(affecting sections 4.12, 4.14, and Appendix 10). This would require a 
simple vote by the Board of Directors, and would avoid some confusion 
and having to formally designate a subset of the TC to respect the 
letter of the bylaws.

3- Maximal bylaws change
Create a new body ("steering committee" for example) replacing the TC 
and the UC. This would require changing sections 4.1, 4.12, 4.13, 4.14, 
4.20, 7.1.b, 7.4, 9.1, 9.2.d, and Appendixes 4 and 10. Section 4.13, 7.1 
and 7.4 being heavily protected in the bylaws, they require special 
votes by each class of Foundation members, probably a multi-year effort. 
A lot of documentation would also need to be changed in case the TC is 
renamed.

I personally don't think the benefit of the change offsets the large 
cost of option (3). Given the current vacancy in the UC makeup I would 
recommend we pursue option 1 immediately (starting at the next TC 
election in April), and propose minimal bylaws change to the board in 
parallel (option 2).

Thoughts ?

-- 
Thierry Carrez