Open Stack

Thoughts below, thanks for bringing this up Mohammed!

On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 4:47 PM Mohammed Naser <mnaser at vexxhost.com> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone:
>
> We're now in a spot where we have an increasing amount of projects
> that don't end up with a volunteer as PTL, even if the project has
> contributors .. no one wants to hold that responsibility alone for
> many reasons.  With time, the PTL role has become far more overloaded
> with many extra responsibilities than what we define in our charter:
>
> https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/charter.html#project-team-leads
>
> I think it's time to re-evaluate the project leadership model that we
> have.  I am thinking that perhaps it would make a lot of sense to move
> from a single PTL model to multiple maintainers.  This would leave it
> up to the maintainers to decide how they want to sort the different
> requirements/liaisons/contact persons between them.
>

I think this is vital, however at the same time the projects need to
reconsider what their commitments are. I feel like most of the liaison
model was for us to handle community scale and relay information, and
that essentially stopped being effective as teams began to scale back
the pool of active contributors and time that can be focused on
supporting projects. In other words, does it still make sense to have
a release liaison? oslo liaison? etc. Can we not move to a
collaborative model instead of putting single points of contact in
place?

See: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CrossProjectLiaisons

> The above is just a very basic idea, I don't intend to diving much
> more in depth for now as I'd like to hear about what the rest of the
> community thinks.
>
> Thanks,
> Mohammed
>

Off hand, I feel like my initial mental response was "Noooo!". Upon
thinking of this and talking to Mohammed some, I think it is a
necessary evolutionary step.  As a burned out PTL who cares, I wonder
"who will step up after me" and carry what I perceive as the
organizational and co-ordination overhead, standing on stage, and
running meetings. Nothing prevents any contributor from running a
community meeting, standing on a stage and giving a talk or project
update! We are a community, and single points of contact just lead
community members to burnout.

Possibly what we are lacking is a "Time for a meeting!" bot.