Technical Committee Highlights May 13, 2015

Based on multiple inputs from the openstack-dev mailing list, we’ve discovered we, the TC, need to level up our communications. We have identified two TC members to take on the communications plan, Anne Gentle (that’s me!) and Flavio Percoco. See below for details of the plan, and thanks for reading the first post in the revitalized series.

Welcome and thanks

After the TC elections were complete and validated, we said goodbye to Vish Ishaya, Devanandra van der Veen and Michael Still, and we welcomed new TC members Robert Collins, Jay Pipes, Dean Troyer and Flavio Percoco. The TC voted for Theirry Carrez to continue as TC chair for running the meetings and keeping the TC patch backlog reviewed and organized.

Summit preparation and cross-project track

A subteam worked through the 28 proposals for the cross-project track at the summit to fit into 14 available fishbowl rooms. Doug Hellman then presented it to the TC and we approved it for him to then apply his “note-cards-on-the-floor schedule resolution algorithm” to fit them into available time slots. Those have been pushed to sched at libertydesignsummit.sched.org.

Communication plan

Our goals for communicating about TC activity are to inform both the electorate and the wider community about decisions made, directions pointed, or guidance given through the OpenStack Technical Committee. We’ll use regular posts to the OpenStack Blog, pointers to the post in the weekly Community mailing list, and the feed to http://planet.openstack.org to issue regular communications.

We’ll continue to listen on the openstack-dev mailing list for any issues that come up, and use patches to the governance repo to shape the agenda each week. The final decisions are published to http://governance.openstack.org. Let us know if you envision any additional channels posting to the openstack-dev mailing list. While we did also consider a Twitter account for the TC, we won’t use a common account to avoid splitting attention across too many channels.

New project team guide

In the spirit of replacing aging wiki pages and oral tradition, a small team is tackling writing a project team guide. When we say “be an OpenStack team” we need to be specific about the meaning, processes, releases, and be able to point to documentation that defines our culture and expectations. Jim Blair, Flavio Percoco, Doug Hellman, and Thierry Carrez have agreed to start this effort.

Repository patches policy

Recently the TC decided to keep the repo list tidy by allowing the TC chair to push through basic listing changes proposed by a Project Team Lead (PTL) to their own projects. The agreement is to skip discussing repo additions in the Tuesday TC meeting and instead, let the patches be viewed for at least one week. Then, as long as there is no -1 from a TC member that may need discussion, the TC chair can approve them if the changes have PTL +1 and no TC member -1 by then.

Agenda timing

The process for getting an item considered for the TC meeting agenda had been documented as being proposed “at least 4 business days before meeting,” but now that items are proposed to Gerrit, Thierry proposed changing the agenda schedule to better match the way we work now. We all agreed we can consider a change TC meeting material if posted before 0800 UTC Friday.

Tags, tagging, and marking

We managed to time-box large, expansive discussions about reviews for tags to help define a “tc-approved-release” tag as well as a “compute-kernel” tag. We didn’t go into the discussions expecting resolution, and with the Summit coming up next week, we just wanted to hear more from each other on each topic in real-time, outside of the patch review itself. For the “tc-approved-release” tag, it is meant to embody the Technical Committees responsibility under the bylaws of the OpenStack Foundation. The “compute-kernel” tag is intended to indicate which projects are essential to a basic compute use case. In fact, we even discussed changing the tag name to include use-case. At this point, it’s probably best to read the logs from the meeting and follow along the reviews, as we made no conclusions.

We’re all looking forward to a great week in Vancouver. Thanks for the ongoing input, and keep it coming.

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