Open Stack

Hi TC members,

Like I mentioned in open discussion at the last meeting, I received some 
comments that the TC meeting jumps from dead boring rubberstamping to 
discussion so animated nobody can follow. So I'd like to think a bit 
about potential changes there.

We've implemented a number of changes already. Most governance changes 
are lazy-approved. A good portion of the remaining things are pretty 
consensual, but we still take a few minutes at the meeting to raise them 
to give a chance to a TC member (or a community member) to object and 
start a discussion about it. The Newton membership seems better than the 
Mitaka membership at reviewing changes in advance of the TC meeting 
(even if a lot still review at the last minute, probably prompted by the 
meeting agenda).

What else should we change ? The major issue is that we use the TC 
weekly meeting to debate the issue between members and past the initial 
introduction (which I usually prepare in advance) IRC is not the best 
way to structure your thought, all discussion happens interleaved, and 
one hour is usually not enough. The other, more asynchronous forums we 
have to discuss such issues (review, ML) generally do not help in 
building consensus between TC members -- they are primarily used by the 
wider community to give their input, and are often abused by a vocal 
minority. That's fine (we need that input) but it's not helping in 
building consensus between voting members. As a result, for complex 
questions, we more and more use private one-on-one discussions to 
discuss the topic, which is exclusive and time-consuming.

So what should we do to avoid the current issue ?
- take turns speaking ? That would likely make the discussion easier to 
follow but also likely slow down the discussion so much we would not be 
able to go through a lot in one hour
- have such discussions on openstack-tc ? That would work but may feel a 
little exclusive
- abandon the meeting (or keep it for open discussion every two weeks) 
and do everything through ML / Gerrit ?
- Do not automatically discuss everything in governance but only things 
a member raises specifically as IRC meeting topic ? (i.e. if after one 
week a thing has 7-votes and nobody puts it on the agenda, consider it good)
- something else ?
- not change anything -- I can follow heated IRC discussions using my 
4-core brain and type faster than lightning

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)