On 07/09/16 17:43 +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
Hi everyone,As you probably know by now, starting with the Boston event in 2017, the Summit will happen further away from the release day and more around the middle of the next development cycle. You can find more info on the rationale for that at [1] and [2] if interested, this is not the topic of this email. One interesting side-effect is that since the timing of the election period (for PTL and TC positions) is defined in the TC charter[3] relative to the *Summit*, it means that (unless we change this) we'll now run elections to renew PTL and TC positions in the middle of the cycle. Crazy, right ? That's what I first thought. But after discussing it with various people, this is not as crazy as it sounds. First, the current election timing is not perfect -- we change PTLs in the middle of the design summit prep, with old PTLs making Design Summit space requests that will affect their successor. It's not as if there was a perfect timing for doing elections. Second, release cycles are longer than 6 months. They actually start a few months before actual development starts, with discussions on next cycle priorities and Design Summit prep. They continue a few months after release, with critical stable branch backports and communication about landed features. So they are one year-long, overlapping cycles (like explained on the diagram at [4]). With that in mind, the PTL/TC election actually would happen just before the start of the start of the requirements-gathering pre-development phase of the next development cycle, which makes a lot of sense. Now, the main drawback of holding elections in the middle of a development cycle is that you don't want to introduce a discontinuity in leadership in that development cycle. To mitigate that, we propose the introduction of a new role, the "release steward", which would be attached to the release cycle. That person (who may or may not double as PTL) would be responsible for a complete release cycle on a given project team, from requirements gathering phase to post-release bugfix-backport phase. A sort of per-cycle release liaison on steroids. Since development cycles overlap, there would be two active release stewards at all times. This would help with the awkward situation where the PTL ends up having to think about the next cycle and prepare the Design Summit (or PTG) while still being knee-deep juggling with feature freeze exceptions, getting the current release out of the door, and coordinating early critical fixes stable backports. Those two jobs could be held by two different people. Now, some teams (especially those doing intermediary releases) may want to use the same super-human to handle everything (PTL, release steward, release+1 steward), and some others might use two or three humans to spread the load. That's up to them. But once designated by the newly-elected PTL, the release steward would be responsible for the full release cycle and would not be displaced by the next PTL 6 months later. One year being a long time, if a steward needs to step down, the currently-active PTL would appoint someone else to finish the job. With this new concept I think we can get the best of both worlds, and keep the election period as currently defined in the charter (rather than having to change it). The PTLs we will elect in the coming weeks won't be renewed before April, 2017 -- while Pike development will start in February. I know this can all be a bit confusing, so feel free to reach out to me with questions on this. [1] http://www.openstack.org/ptg [2] http://www.openstack.org/ptg/ptgfaq/ [3] http://governance.openstack.org/reference/charter.html#election-for-ptl-seats [4] http://www.openstack.org/themes/openstack/images/summit-ptg-timeline-revised.png
Just want to add my opinion to the pool. I think this is a good idea and I believe this would also help PTLs share the load, which is something I've personally recommended to every PTL. As other folks mentioned in this thread, I believe this will also help increasing leadership in the community, which would be another win! Flavio -- @flaper87 Flavio Percoco
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