Open Stack

On 20/05/16 13:56 -0500, Kyle Mestery wrote:
>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.


Yup! +1

>> 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.

Yup, yup, yup! +1

>> 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

Yeah, it'd require more meetings to actually reach any consensus if we take
turns and I don't think this would actually guarantee focus. It would help with
having a slower discussion.

>> - have such discussions on openstack-tc ? That would work but may feel a
>> little exclusive

I guess we could even use openstack-dev... *shrugs*

>> - abandon the meeting (or keep it for open discussion every two weeks) and
>> do everything through ML / Gerrit ?

Not sure if abandoning the IRC meetings altogether is the right call but I do
think more discussions on gerrit/ML would help.

My only problem with emails is that we'll likely end up with threads full of 4
pages long emails and likely no consensus. Have we ever reached consensus on
things over email?

Without someone summarizing and keeping track of what's going on in the email,
we won't be able to do much there.

>> - 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 ?

We kinda do this already, don't we?

>> - not change anything -- I can follow heated IRC discussions using my 4-core
>> brain and type faster than lightning

I don't think the only problem is following the discussions, I believe the
current structure doesn't allow for discussing things through properly.

With heated discussions - golang's topic, for example - we always end up talking
about 5 different things at the same time within groups of 3 or 4 people each.
There are few folks that try to keep an eye on every conversation and there are
even fewer folks that succeed at this. There are also folks that simply step
back and decide to read without participating.

I'm one of those that tries to keep up with everything and I fail more often
than not. In my case, I don't think it's a problem of how fast/slow I can read
but how frustrated I feel with how the communication is going and the fact that
most of my messages seem to go nowhere.

>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.

I don't mind the TC meetings per se, what I don't like is how messy and
unfocused some discussions can become. I believe that's kind of expected to
happen given the importance of some topics but I don't think having 4 different
conversations per subject is a good use of the TC meeting time.

These unfocused, heated, discussions used to happen way more often. We now do
most of the things on Gerrit but there are still few things that deserve "live"
discussions.

I've been thinking more about this and I believe what we need is to be more
strong with keeping the IRC conversation focused. All the parallel discussions
are not helpful. It's like being in an in-person meeting and having everyone
talking over each other about different things. Sure, it's IRC but...

Flavio

-- 
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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