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TC Report 48

Due to the recent Summit in Sydney, related travel, and Thanksgiving, it has been a while since I put a TC Report together. It is hard to get back in the groove. Much of the recent discussion has either been reflecting on Summit-initiated discussions or trying to integrate results from those discussions into plans for the future.

Summit Reflections

A lot of my TC-related summit thinking is in a series of blog posts I made last week. This isn't the "Chris promotes his blog report" but I do think that these represent some important OpenStack issues, related to stuff the TC talks about often, so here they are:

Some other summit summaries that might be of interest:

Graham mentions a few things of interest from the joint leadership meeting that happened the Sunday before summit:

  • The potential expansion of the Foundation to include other projects, separate from OpenStack and with separate governance, to address the complexities of integrating all the pieces that get involved in doing stuff with clouds. OpenStack itself continues with its focus on the base infrastructure. There's a press release with a bit more information, and it was talked about during the keynote.

  • A somewhat bizarre presentation suggesting the Board and the TC manage the OpenStack roadmap. There wasn't time to actually discuss this as previous topics ran way over, but at a superficial glance it appeared to involve a complete misunderstanding of not just how open source works in OpenStack, but how open source works in general.

A Tech/Dev/? Blog

Throughout the past week there's been a lot of discussion of how to address the desire for a blog that's been variously described as a "dev blog" (news of what's going on with OpenStack development) or a "tech blog" (a kind of "humble brag" about any cool (dev-related) stuff going on, to remind people that OpenStack does interesting things).

On Thursday there was talk about technology to use, differences of opinion on what content should be present, and the extent to which curation should be involved. If none, why not just carry on with planet?

There was more on Monday and then an email thread.

The eventual outcome is that the existing but rarely used OpenStack Blog would make sense for this but only if there were human involvement in choosing what content should be present. An Acquisitions Editor was suggested. Josh Harlow was press ganged, but it's not clear if the hook set.

PTL Meeting (or tech leadership void filling)

Another topic on Thursday was the notion of having some kind of formal process whereby project roadmaps were more actively visible to other projects in the OpenStack ecosystem. There's an etherpad started but probably best to start with the log which also links to some twitter discussion. A summary (common throughout all the discussion this past week) is "maybe we should get people talking to each other more often?"

The topic evolved and went what might look like two ways: how do we address the perceived void of technical leadership and

I think underlying all of this is that there are people in the commu[n]ity who are concerned that sometimes we have bad or at least not on the same page actors, and we have no mechanism for dealing with that. me

but to some extent that's part and parcel of the same thing.

PTG Timing

Yet more on Thursday: initial discussion of how to divide up time and otherwise format things at the forthcoming PTG in Dublin. There's further discussion on an os-dev thread. Most people seem to be coming down in favor of sticking with what we know.

Project Goals

The Rocky cycle approaches, and that means it is time to start thinking about goals. Logs today for more on that. We are at the stage where candidate goals are being sought. Meanwhile there's some discussion on how best to manage tracking the goals. The current process can be somewhat noisy.

Engaging with the Board

Another topic that happened throughout the week was reflection on the difficulty engaging in full and inclusive conversation with the Board at the leadership meeting. People who either won't or can't engage in an interruption and interjection style of interaction are left out of the discussion. Entry points into the log at Thursday, Friday, Monday.

In the discussion there appear to be two different approaches or attitudes in response to this problem. One is that the problems are the result of too many people attending the meetings and that smaller meetings could address the problems.

The other is that meeting formalisms and general rules of good behavior are not being followed and that as it is important for the entire TC to be engaged with the board, something ought to be done to raise awareness that while people would like to participate the current set up does not make that easy.

I'm in the latter camp. The TC is intentionally an elected body that is fairly large, large enough for it to have a diversity of perspectives. Whatever the base definitions are of "governance", being elected makes the TC representatives of the people who elected them. The leadership meetings are the one time when the TC gets to engage in an official capacity with the Board and User Committee. We should do our best to make sure that it is a setting where all representatives have an opportunity to be present, hear, and be heard.

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