This is a TC Report, but since everything that happened in its window of observation is preparing for the PTG, being at the PTG, trying to get home from the PTG, and recovering from the PTG, perhaps think of this as "What the TC talked about [at] the PTG". As it is impossible to be everywhere at once (especially when the board meeting overlaps with other responsibilities) this will miss a lot of important stuff. I hope there are other summaries.

As you may be aware, it snowed in Dublin causing plenty of disruption to the PTG but everyone (foundation staff, venue staff, hotel staff, attendees, uisce beatha) worked together to make a good week.

Talking about the PTG at the PTG

At the board meeting, the future of the PTG was a big topic. As currently constituted it presents some challenges:

• It is difficult for some people to attend because of visa and other travel related issues.
• It is expensive to run and not everyone is convinced of the return on investment.
• Some people don't like it (they either miss the old way of doing the design summit, or midcycles, or $OTHER).
• Plenty of other reasons that I'm probably not aware of.

This same topic was reviewed at yesterday's office hours.

For now, the next 2018 PTG is going to happen (destination unknown) but plans for 2019 are still being discussed.

If you have opinions about the PTG, there will be an opportunity to express them in a forthcoming survey. Beyond that, however, it is important that management at contributing companies hear from more people (notably their employees) than the foundation about the value of the PTG.

My own position is that of the three different styles of in-person events for technical contributors to OpenStack that I've experienced (design summit, mid-cycles, PTG), the PTG is the best yet. It minimizes distractions from other obligations (customer meetings, presentations, marketing requirements) while maximizing cross-project interaction.

One idea, discussed yesterday and earlier today was to have the PTG be open to technical participants of any sort, not just so-called "OpenStack developers". Make it more of a place for people who hack on and with OpenStack to hack and talk. Leave the summit (without a forum) for presentations, marketing, pre-sales, etc.

An issue raised with conflating the PTG and the Forum is that it would remove the inward/outward focus concept that is supposed to distinguish the two events.

I guess it depends on how we define "we" but I've always assumed that both events were for outward focus and that for any inward focussing effort we ought to be able use asynchronous tools more.

Foundation and OCI

Thierry mentioned yesterday that it is likely that the OpenStack Foundation will join the Open Container Initiative because of Kata and LOCI.

This segued into some brief concerns about the attentions and intentions of the Foundation, aggravated by the board meeting schedule conflict (there's agreement that will never ever happen again), and the rumor milling about the PTG.

Friday at the PTG with the TC

The TC had scheduled a half day of discussion for Friday at the PTG. A big agenda, a fun filled week, and the snow meant we went nearly all day (and since there's no place to go, let's talk, let's talk, let's talk) with some reasonable progress. Some highlights:

• There was some discussion on trying to move forward with constellations concept, but I don't recall specific outcomes from that discussion.

• The team diversity tags need to be updated to reflect adjustments in the very high bars we set earlier in the history of OpenStack. We agreed to not remove projects from the tc-approved tag, as that could be taken the wrong way. Instead we'll create a new tag for projects that are in the trademark program.

• Rather than having Long Term Support, which implies too much, a better thing to do is enable extended maintenance for those parties who want to do it.

• Heat was approved to be a part of the trademark program, but then there were issues with where to put their tests and the tooling used to manage them. By the power of getting the right people in the room at the same time, we reached some consensus which is being finalized on a proposed resolution.

• We need to make an official timeline for the deprecation (and eventual removal) of support for Python 2, meaning we also need to accelerate the adoption of Python 3 as the primary environment.

• In a discussion about the availability of etcd it was decided that tooz needs to be finished.

See the etherpad for additional details.