If a common theme exists in TC activity in the past week, it is the cloudy nature of leadership and governance and how this relates to what the TC should be doing, as a body, and how TC members, as individuals, should identify what they are doing ("I'm doing this with my TC hat on", "I am not doing this with my TC hat on").
It's a bit of a strange business, to me, because I think much of what a TC member can do is related to the relative freedom being elected allows them to achieve. I feel I can budget the time to write this newsletter because I'm a TC member, but I would be doing a bad thing if I declared that this document was an official utterance of OpenStack governance™.
Other TC members probably have a much different experience.
Entropy and Governance
The theme started with a discussion about driving some cleanup of stale repos on https://git.openstack.org/cgit and whether that was an activity that should be associated with the TC role. It is clear there are some conflicts:
- Because many repositories on
git.openstack.orgare not official OpenStack projects it would be inappropriate to manage them out of existence. In this case, using OpenStack infra does not indicate volunteering oneself to be governed by the TC. Only being official does that. - On the other hand, if being on the TC represents a kind of leadership and presents a form of freedom-to-do, then such cleanups represent an opportunity to, as Sean put it, improve things: "Governed or not, I care about OpenStack and would like to see it not weighed down by entropy." In some sense, the role of the TC is to exercise that caring for OpenStack and what that caring is is context-dependent.
These issues are further complicated by the changing shape of the OpenStack Foundation where there will be things which are officially part of the Foundation (such as Kata), and may use OpenStack infra, but have little to no relationship with the TC. Expect this to get more complicated before it gets less.
That was before office-hours. By the time office hours started, the conversation abstracted (as it often does) into more of a discussion about the role of the TC with me saying:
What I'm upset (mildly) about is our continued effort to sort [of] not have the TC fill the leadership void that I think exists in OpenStack. The details of this particular case are a stimulus for that conversation, but not necessar[il]y relevant.
(I did get a bit cranky in the discussion, my apologies to those who there. This is one of the issues that I'm most passionate about in OpenStack and I let myself run away a bit. My personal feeling has always been that we need an activist and responsive TC if we expect to steward an environment that improves and adapts to change.)
The log is worth reading if this is a topic of interest to you. We delineated some problems that have been left on the floor in the past, some meta-problems with how we identify problems, and even had some agreement on things to try.
OpenStack-wide Goals
Mixed in with the above discussions—and a good example of where the TC does provide some coordination and leadership to help guide all the boats in a similar direction—were efforts to establish sufficient proposals for OpenStack-wide goals to make a fair choice. There are now four reviews pending:
It's quite likely that the StoryBoard goal will move to later, to get increased experience with it (such as by using it for tracking rocky goals). That leaves the other three. They provide a nice balance between improving the user experience, improving the operator experience, and dealing with some technical debt.
If you have thoughts on these goals you should comment on the reviews. There is also a mailing list thread in progress.
Late in the day today, there was discussion of perhaps limiting the number of goals. Some projects are still trying to complete queens goals and were delayed for various reasons, including greater than expected time required to adapt to zuulv3.
Interop Testing
Colleen provided a useful summary of the situation with the location of tests for the interop program. This discussion ground to a bit of a halt but needs to be resolved.
Project Boundaries in Expanded Foundation
Qinling has applied to be official. It is a project to do function as a service. This caused some conversation this morning on what impact the expansion of the Foundation will have on the evaluation of candidate projects.
S Cycle Voting
Also this morning Thierry started the process of making it official that the naming poll for the S cycle will be public. If you have reason to believe this is a bad idea, please comment on the review.