At the forum last week the TC held a retrospective to discuss how we felt things have gone for the TC over the last 6-ish months, since the previous election. I will try to summarize the feedback here based on the notes in the etherpad [1], but please reply if I misremember something, leave out details, or otherwise give an incomplete view of what we talked about.
We approached the retro using the 3 questions (what went well, what didn't go well, what can we change) but in this summary I'm going to focus on each topic, because some ended up in multiple sections. We all agreed that having some new members on the TC is healthy. Graham, Mohammed, and Zane have all already started taking a very active role. The work Thierry has done to engage with the kubernetes community leadership through in-person meetings at some of their conferences has been received well by participants from both groups. The recent event in Copenhagen was more lightly attended than the one in Austin in December, in part because of the increased demands on the time from the participants as their events grow larger. We, of course, also have other outreach activities from Dims, hogepoge, and others who are working directly on integration projects, but since this was a TC retrospective we were talking specifically about TC-led engagement between the communities. Our efforts at communicating outside of office hours through discussion digests and the #openstack-tc channel seem to be going well. There was some discussion of whether the office hours themselves are useful, based on the apparent lack of participation. We had theories that this was a combination of bad times (meaning that TC members haven't always attended) and bad platforms (meaning that some parts of the community we are trying to reach may emphasize other tools over IRC for real time chat). We need to look into that. Thierry brought up the point that the diversity tags may be less relevant as they are currently defined, especially because some projects with very low activity may end up bouncing back and forth between "diverse" and not with a very small change in participation. Mohammed and Thierry are going to work on addressing that. See the thread starting with http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2018-May/130776.html for details. There was some discussion of how well the interaction with the Foundation staff and Board is working. Opinions were mixed, but generally still positive. I will be working with Alan to increase engagement with the Board and with Thierry and other Foundation staff on that relationship. I encourage all of you to join the Board meetings when it is possible. It looks like we will have another in-person joint leadership meeting before the PTG in Denver, so start thinking of things we might want to place on the agenda for discussion. Keep in mind that given the large size of the group, pre-seeding discussions with a mailing list thread can help frame things for everyone, just like with design summit sessions. Chris also brought up a concern about a decline in the electorate voting for TC members. I don't remember having enough details in the room to confirm this as an overall trend, but there was some discussion of the most recent numbers seeming low in an unhealthy way. We need to talk about this further. Jeremy also brought up a lack of geographic diversity among the candidates who won the elections. That continues to be a challenge, and the cause isn't obvious to me. I hope that past (and future) candidates will get involved with the TC regardless of the outcome of the election, since we do want their input and being active is one of the best ways to raise your profile for an election. Colleen mentioned that our goal selection was "contentious" and based on the discussion of Stein goals and the goal process in general I think we have some good feedback about how to improve that. I'm sure Sean will be posting about that session separately. Chris brought up a concern about whether we have much traction on "doing stuff" and especially "getting things done that not everyone wants," Graham noted a lack of "visible impact," and Zane mentioned the TC vision in particular. Based on conversations last week, I am currently tracking a list of 20+ things the TC is working on. I will add the public ones to the wiki page this week as I catch up with my notes (remember, sometimes these things involve disputes that can be more smoothly handled one-on-one, so not everything that is going on is necessarily going to have its own email thread announcing it). As far as the vision, although we aren't "done" with those items, I do think we’re doing better than may be obvious, in part because we haven’t reviewed it recently. Thierry, Emilien, and Jeremy volunteered to review our progress. It would be good to do that before the PTG, and to especially consider how we can talk more about the impact of the changes we have made as part of that work. Related to the discussion of being effective, I proposed that we team up on each task we agree to take on. By having at least 2 TC members looking at each item, we’ll have better coverage when someone is on vacation, etc. Ideally we will not always pair up with the same folks, so we also have more of an opportunity to work together. Related to the idea of being more active, I proposed that we more actively engage with PTLs and project teams to try to spot issues before they fester. Last week we started addressing at least 2 such issues that only came to light in other conversations, which tells me we can't sit back and wait for PTLs to ask for help. I will work on a plan for dividing up responsibility for checking with teams. Zane proposed introducing some sort of cadence to making progress. Perhaps by having teams of 2 or more focusing on different areas, we can set up a regular reporting schedule to trigger that? Every 2 weeks? Again, this is my personal attempt to summarize what I remember from the discussion based on the notes. Please don't hesitate to add to the thread. Doug [1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/YVR-tc-retrospective __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev