Excerpts from Amrith Kumar's message of 2016-06-22 13:15:03 +0000: > Clint, > > In your original email, you proposed "So, with that, I'd like to propose the > creation of an Architecture Working Group. This group's charge would not be > design by committee, but a place for architects to share their designs and > gain support across projects to move forward with and ratify architectural > decisions." > > I like parts of this, and parts of this trouble me. But, I volunteered to be > part of this activity because I have a real problem that this group could > help me solve and I bet there are others who have this problem as well. > > As you say, there are often problems, questions, and challenges of an > architectural nature, that have a scope larger than a single project. I would > like there to be a forum whose primary focus is to provide an avenue where > these can be discussed. I would like it to be a place less noisy than "take > it to the ML" and be a place where one could pose these questions and > potentially discuss solutions that other projects have adopted. > > The part I'm uncomfortable is the implied decision making authority of > "ratifying architectural decisions". To ratify implies the ability to make > official, the ability to "approve and sanction formally" and I ask whence > came this power and authority? > > Who currently has this power and authority, and is that individual or group > delegating it to this working group? >
When I say ratify there, what I mean is that this group would have regular members who work on the group. To ratify something, a majority of them would at least agree that this was something worth the group's time, and that the group should publish their architecture decisions publicly. The membership, I think, should be voluntary, and the only requirement be that members regularly participate in discussions and voting. Formality is a useful tool here, which is the reason I chose the word 'ratify'. It asks that those who want to propose new ideas do so in an efficient manner that doesn't make noise on the mailing list and force everyone to come up with an opinion on the spot or forever lose the idea. We get a log of proposals, objections, and reasoning, to go along with our log of successes and failures in taking the proposals to reality. But the only power this group wields is over itself. Of course, collaboration with the project teams is _critical_ for the success of these proposals. And if we succeed in improving some projects, but others resist, then it's up to those projects that have been improved to support us pushing forward or not. This isn't all that different than the way Oslo specs and OpenStack specs work now. It's just that we'll have a group that organizes the efforts and keeps pressure on them. > While this ML thread is very interesting, it is also beginning to fragment > and I would like to propose a spec in Gerrit with a draft charter for this > working group and a review there. > You're spot on Amrith. I've been noodling on a mission statement and was going to bring it up at next week's TC meeting, but we don't have to wait for that. Let's draft a charter now. Any suggestions on where that should be submitted? openstack-specs I suppose? Governance? __________________________________________________________________________ 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