Open Stack

Hi everyone,

One of the areas identified as a priority by the Board + TC + UC workshop
in March was the need to better close the feedback loop and make unanswered
requirements emerge. Part of the solution is to ensure that groups that
look at specific use cases, or specific problem spaces within OpenStack get
participation from a wide spectrum of roles, from pure operators of
OpenStack clouds, to upstream developers, product managers, researchers,
and every combination thereof. In the past year we reorganized the Design
Summit event, so that the design / planning / feedback gathering part of it
would be less dev- or ops-branded, to encourage participation of everyone
in a neutral ground, based on the topic being discussed. That was just a
first step.

In OpenStack we have a number of "working groups", groups of people
interested in discussing a given use case, or addressing a given problem
space across all of OpenStack. Examples include the API working group, the
Deployment working group, the Public clouds working group, the Telco/NFV
working group, or the Scientific working group. However, for governance
reasons, those are currently set up either as a User Committee working
group[1], or a working group depending on the Technical Committee[2]. This
branding of working groups artificially discourages participation from one
side to the others group, for no specific reason. This needs to be fixed.

We propose to take a page out of Kubernetes playbook and set up "SIGs"
(special interest groups), that would be primarily defined by their mission
(i.e. the use case / problem space the group wants to collectively
address). Those SIGs would not be Ops SIGs or Dev SIGs, they would just be
OpenStack SIGs. While possible some groups will lean more towards an
operator or dev focus (based on their mission), it is important to
encourage everyone to join in early and often. SIGs could be very easily
set up, just by adding your group to a wiki page, defining the mission of
the group, a contact point and details on meetings (if the group has any).
No need for prior vetting by any governance body. The TC and UC would
likely still clean up dead SIGs from the list, to keep it relevant and
tidy. Since they are neither dev or ops, SIGs would not use the -dev or the
-operators lists: they would use a specific ML (openstack-sigs ?) to hold
their discussions without cross-posting, with appropriate subject tagging.

Not everything would become a SIG. Upstream project teams would remain the
same (although some of them, like Security, might turn into a SIG). Teams
under the UC that are purely operator-facing (like the Ops Tags Team or the
AUC recognition team) would likewise stay as UC subteams.

Comments, thoughts ?

[1]
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/UserCommittee#Working_Groups_and_Teams
[2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Upstream_Working_Groups

-- 
Melvin Hillsman & Thierry Carrez
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