I'm not fully recovered from summit yet, so this will not cover everything. It will pick back up next week once I'm back in the full flow.
Notes from Summit
Elsewhere I'll create a more complete write up of the Foundation board meeting that happened on the Sunday before summit, but some comments from that feel relevant to the purpose of these reports:
When new people were being introduced around the table, TC members did not include their company affiliations, board members did. This is good.
Repeated (but not frequent) theme of different members of the board expressing a need for requirements to be given to the TC to give to "the devs", sometimes via the product working group. Sometimes this felt a bit like "someone please give the devs a kick".
At the same time new board members were accepted wthout the new members giving concrete statements about how many resources (human or hardware) they were going to promise "upstream".
Cultural barriers to engagement for new participants is a huge deal. Lots of employees at lots of companies do not have an easy way to grok open source in general or the OpenStack way.
It's a complicated situation resolution of which likely requires greater communication between the TC, the UC (and related working groups) and the Board, but as usual, many people are over-tasked.
Meeting Minutes
Log: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2017/tc.2017-05-16-20.01.html
Summit Followup
Some discussion on expanding the breadth of Forum sessions beyond three at a time. Most people did not want to expand as double booking can be a significant problem.
Some people (notably mriedem, nova PTL) said that the sessions seemed too dev-centric and did not provide as much user and ops feedback as was hoped. That is: the number of users and operators present was not greatly increased and the set of users and operators who spoke were the usual suspects.
Forum attendees felt obliged to be in forum rooms so missed out on opportunities to witness conference presentations and see what the real world is up to. This is unfortunate because, well, it's the real world where real stuff is happening.
But, in general, it felt like good improvement. For next time:
- recording the on-boarding sessions
- improving (making more visible) last minute scheduling of un-used rooms
- greater preparation/agenda-making for some sessions
Next Steps TC Vision
https://review.openstack.org/453262
There was a feedback session at summit regarding the vision:
The feedback from that needs to be integrated with the feedback from the recent survey, digested, and a new version of the review created. Apparently a lot of people at the summit session weren't aware of it, which says something about the info flow.
Deprecating postgresql in OpenStack
https://review.openstack.org/427880
This is a move to document that postgresql is not actively tested in the gate nor considered a good choice for deployment.
Since this is my opinionated view of events: I don't think this is the right approach (because it is effectively changing a deployed API and we don't allow that other places), but there are many legitimate reasons for the described approach, mostly to do with not misleading people about the degree of support that upstream OpenStack is providing for postgresql.
Document voting process for formal-vote
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/463141/
With the change to be more mailing list oriented, changes are needed to the TC voting process to make sure that resolutions are visible to everyone and have sufficient time for review. This turns out to be more complicated than it might initially sound: some votes? all votes? count by business days or absolute days?
Thoughts from the Meeting and Summit
It felt like we spent a lot of the meeting expressing strategies for how to constrain options and actions in reaction to unavailable resources, and not enough time on considering strategies for gaining more resources. This while the board is expressing a relatively healthy budget and welcoming one new platinum and two new gold members and not being fully cognizant of how OpenStack development really works. The TC needs to be more active in expressing the needs of the technical community to the board that represents the companies that provides many resources. It's a two way street.
The TC is currently doing a lot of work to improve its process: potentially killing meetings, changing how pending resolutions are communicated to the community. This is important stuff because it will eventually help to increase participation and diversity of participants, but presumably it needs to be alongside ensuring that we (as an entire community) are making good stuff in a sustainable fashion. Only a very small amount of the discussion at today's TC meeting or at last week's board meeting was related to concrete technical planning. Hopefully the enhanced visibility that will result from increased use of the mailing list will drive some of that.
dhellman and ttx are going to start creating a presentation to the board reminding them about how things work with regard to things getting done. It's not just throwing requirements over the wall. This is good.