openstack-poc team mailing list archive

[Justin Santa Barbara <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 5:52 PM, Jan Drake <jan_drake@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Fascinating.  The tension between community driven and committee driven
> technical direction, it seems.
>

The community elects the TC which takes the time to make tough technical
decisions.  This is representative democracy (although I don't think anyone
is proposing direct democracy.)


> Justin, I would have been way more comfortable had your example been more
> vision and architecture focused instead of consequence-control focused.
>

I tried to pick a case that was going to be divisive.  Focusing on the
"vision" example is - I would hope - uncontroversial and thus not helpful
to advancing the discussion :-)


> I could see the role of the TC as bringing a perspective on highest value
> road-mapping across the projects and assisting in aligning decisioning to
> that. I can see it as a group that makes smart decisions on the boundary
> between core and satellite projects.  I can see it as a driver for
> encouraging integrations with other open source ecosystems.
>
> But, in trademarked Jan form, if you think you can add a control function,
> you're likely off your chum.  (pardon my use of that obscure colloquialism).
>
> After all, "Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the
> masses!  Not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!"
>

My understanding is that the TC will have _more_ of a mandate from the
masses, in that everyone elects the TC, whereas PTL voting is restricted to
developers?  (Of that project?)


>
> Less playfully, however, there is no question that a collaboration the
> size of OpenStack could benefit from vision and architecture perspective
> outside of the individual projects involved.  That said, the intersection
> of such strategic and visionary thinking requires integration with (instead
> of management or separate direction of) the leadership of the projects.
>

> Creating this integration oriented approach rather than an implicitly
> confrontational approach is, I believe, Mr Heck's fine intent.
>

I agree that the TC should work collaboratively with the PTLs, but I think
we need to recognize that they should have different responsibilities, and
thus won't see eye to eye on everything.  I see this as checks and
balances, rather than warfare.

We'll have to trust our community to elect people that can work together;
and they can always elect all the PTLs to the TC.  I suspect this will more
or less happen anyway, and that we're basically arguing about angels on
pinheads.

However, the proposal to require half the TC to be the PTLs, rather than
having them be elected, seems peculiar to me.  It is at least sufficiently
odd that it feels like it shouldn't be our starting point.  If you want to
propose a "constitutional amendment" and get the community to agree to
change the rules, then please do so!  But, in my opinion, the right time
for that is a year or two down the road, once we see how this grand
experiment turns out.  Until then, I expect we'll vote in most of the PTLs
and additional people we think are reasonable people that will work well
with them; so I expect everyone will be happy.  If  we get a profoundly
different result from our elections, we probably have bigger problems.

Justin