openstack-poc team mailing list archive

[Thierry Carrez <thierry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jan Drake wrote:
> I have to say I concur with Mr. Heck's quite cogent perspective.  Would
> love to see his points addressed on this thread.

I certainly hear Joe's points: if we don't want decisions to be taken
against all PTLs, why build the vulnerability in ?

My answer to that is that by doing so, you build a riskier vulnerability in.

First, I think the risk you want to protect against is overrated. You
all too much put emphasis on the vote, and not enough on the discussion
that should come before it. The TC draft mandates that the topics
presented to the TC are discussed within the community for 5 business
days before any vote. This allows for consensus building, with all
members of the community, including influential people being able to
weigh in.

I certainly hope that most decisions would actually not need to be
decided in the final vote. And if there is conflict, I never expect it
to be "the PTLs vs. the others". I expect it to be some group against
some other group, representing two opinions in the community. Actually,
could anyone point me to a good example of a decision by the PPB that
could have gone another way with a less PTL-oriented board ?

My opinion is that it's important for the project to choose the most
direct election system to ensure the fairness and the accountability of
the representation. I've been elected in a fair number of member-elected
bodies in open source projects in the past (starting with the infamous
Gentoo Council), and the elected body was *always* accused after some
time of not really representing the community anymore. We should not
build *that* vulnerability in: I've seen that poison kill good projects
before. IMHO the risk for it is higher than the one you want to protect
against, and it's more damaging.

So another way to look at the choice ahead is: when we fail to reach a
consensus within our community, do we prefer to use the fairest possible
representation of our technical contributors, or one that slightly
overrepresents PTLs in order to protect our core projects from
hypothetical abuse ?

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Release Manager, OpenStack