Welcome New TC Members
Main news to report about the OpenStack Technical Committee (TC) is that the elections have finished and there are some new members. The three incumbents that ran returned for another year, meaning three new people join. There's more information in a superuser article. Welcome and congratulations to everyone.
After each election a new chair is selected. Any member of the TC may be the chair, self-nomination is done by posting a review. The traditional chair, Thierry, has posted his nomination.
A welcome message was posted to the TC mailing list with information and references for how things work.
TC Participation
At last Thursday's office hours Emilien asked, as a thought experiment, what people thought of the idea of TC term limits. In typical office hours fashion, this quickly went off into a variety of topics, some only tangentially related to term limits.
To summarize, incompletely, the pro-reason is: Make room and opportunities for new leadership. The con-reason is: Maintain a degree of continuity.
This led to some discussion of the value of "history and baggage" and whether such things are a keel or anchor in managing the nautical metaphor of OpenStack. We did not agree, which is probably good because somewhere in the middle is likely true.
Things then circled back to the nature of the TC: court of last resort or something with a more active role in executive leadership. If the former, who does the latter? Many questions related to significant change are never resolved because it is not clear who does these things.
There's a camp that says "the people who step up to do it". In my experience this is a statement made by people in a position of privilege and may (intentionally or otherwise) exclude others or lead to results which have unintended consequences.
This then led to meandering about the nature of facilitation.
(Like I said, a variety of topics.)
We did not resolve these questions except to confirm that the only way to address these things is to engage with not just the discussion, but also the work.
OpenStack Technical Blog
Josh Harlow showed up with an idea. An OpenStack equivalent of the kubernetes blog, focused on interesting technology in OpenStack. This came up again on Friday.
It's clear that anyone and everyone could write their own blogs and syndicate to the OpenStack planet but this doesn't have the same panache and potential cadence as an official thing might. It comes down to people having the time. Eking out the time for this blog, for example, can be challenging.
Since this is the second week in a row that Josh showed up with an idea, I wonder what next week will bring?