All the bits and pieces of OpenStack are interconnected and interdependent across the many groupings of technology and people. When we plan or make changes, wiggling something here has consequences over there. Some intended, some unintended.

This is such commonly accepted wisdom that to say it risks being a cliche but acting accordingly remains hard.

This morning Thierry and I had a useful conversation about the Tech Vision 2018 etherpad. One of the issues there is agreeing on what we're even talking about. How can we have a vision for a "cloud" if we don't agree what that is? There's hope that clarifying the vision will help unify and direct energy, but as the discussion and the etherpad show, there's work to do.

The lack of clarity on the vision is one of the reasons why Adjutant's application to be official still has no clear outcome.

Meanwhile, to continue last week's theme, the TC's role as listener, mediator, and influencer lacks definition.

Zane wrote up a blog post explaining the various ways in which the OpenStack Foundation is expanding. But this raises questions about what, if any, role the TC has in that expansion. It appears that the board has decided to not to do a joint leadership meeting at the PTG, which means discussions about such things will need to happen in other media, or be delayed until the next summit in Berlin.

To make up for the gap, the TC is planning to hold a gathering to work on some of the much needed big-picture and shared-understanding building.

While that shared understanding is critical, we have to be sure that it incorporates what we can hear from people who are not long-term members of the community. In a long discussion asking if our tooling makes things harder for new contributors several of us tried to make it clear that we have an incomplete understanding about the barriers people experience, that we often assume rather than verify, and that sometimes our interest in and enthusiasm for making incremental progress (because if iterating in code is good and just, perhaps it is in social groups too?) can mean that we avoid the deeper analysis required for paradigm shifts.