Open Stack

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 10:07 AM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
I think the reality is that some items are dead boring and others
cause a majority of folks to get very animated. Your mileage may vary
here, of course. I don't consider this a problem, just the nature of
the things the TC discusses.

> 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).
>
I definitely encourage TC members (as well as all community members)
to simply review the governance repository ahead of time as much as
possible. This does help to streamline things, and in fact can help us
to focus the meetings on issues which do not gain consensus on Gerrit.

> 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
>
Personally, I think it would be good to focus people to reviewing more
on Gerrit, and the ML when that is appropriate. That way, we can keep
the meeting for hot button issues. To me, the meeting is still
important, and I actually enjoy the fast pace discussions we have
there.

Kyle

> --
> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>
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