Moving to open list - posting to the confidential list was more of an accident than deliberate strategy. Mark On 8 Sep 2016 5:39 p.m., "Monty Taylor" <mordred@inaugust.com> wrote:

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Hi!

We started with writing down the principles we currently operate under, because they are the principles we currently operate under but they are not documented anywhere. I fully expect that once they're written down it should give an excellent opportunity to reflect and to suggest that they change.

However, until the existing ones are written down, it's very hard for anyone to challenge them or to suggest corrections to them, since they are basically only defined in the minds of long-timers.

I believe the thing that Chris suggests is an excellent _next_ step. But I do not believe it can happen as a first step, as there is not a clear shared understanding of where we are today.

These are not new principles. They are the current state of the world for the existing technical leadership - and they have been this way for years. If any of them are surprising to anyone, then it's even more important that we write them down so that we can discuss them. I would posit that many of our misunderstandings over the last few years can likely be tracked down to a lack of a shared understanding of some core principle, but lacking anything to point to, it's been very hard to have the discussion about whether a particular choice is in line with them - or even whether we've learned something new about the world and we should change some of our fundamental assumptions.

Also, I do not see any reason that this thread, should it continue, should be on the confidential list. I did not change the list it's going to because I did not start the thread... but I would recommend that perhaps we do this on the open list instead.

Monty

On 09/08/2016 10:17 AM, Mark Baker wrote:

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If you haven't seen this thread below on OpenStack-dev then please take a min to look through as I think it directly relates to the question discussed on the most recent board call of "what is OpenStack".

TL;DR: There a proposal in the OpenStack Governance project to write down the principles under which the OpenStack Community operates. The proposal is to be put to the TC and perhaps (it isn't clear to me yet) the Board.

I agree with some of the commentary raised in the thread that this shouldn't be an exercise in writing down what community members believe to be the guiding principles of OpenStack that thy operate under. It is an opportunity for us to state with more clarity how the community operates which itself is very much a function of what OpenStack is today and strives to be in the future.

Best Regards

Mark Baker

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Chris Dent* <cdent+os@anticdent.org <mailto:cdent%2Bos@anticdent.org>> Date: 8 September 2016 at 12:18 Subject: [openstack-dev] [all] governance proposal worth a visit: Write down OpenStack principles To: OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org <mailto:OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org>

There's a governance proposal in progress at https://review.openstack.org/#/c/357260/ <https://review.openstack.org/#/c/357260/> that I think is worth a visit by anyone interested in the definition and evolution of OpenStack's identity and the processes and guidelines used in OpenStack.

I'm assuming that not everyone regularly cruises the governance project so this thing, which is pretty important, has probably not been seen yet by many community members. It is full of many assertions, some probably controversial, about what OpenStack is and what we get up to.

At the moment a lot of the reviews are obsessing over the details and interpretations of various phrases and paragraphs. This is in preparation for a later presentation to the community that ought to engender a long email thread where we will discuss it and try to ratify. I fear that discussion will also obsess over the details.

The ordering here is backwards from a process that could be happening if what we want is effective engagement and a useful outcome (one where we agree). We should first have a conversation about the general principles that are desired, then capture those into a document and only then obsess over the details. The current process will inevitably privilege the existing text and thus the bias of the authors[1].

I presume that the process that is happening was chosen to avoid too much bikeshedding. The issue with that is that the work we need to do is stepping back a bit and concerning ourselves not with the color of the shed, but with whether it is for bikes, or even a shed. Last we talked about it, it was a tent, but there's no consensus that that is going well.

[1] I don't wish to indicate that there's anything wrong (or right!) about the current text, simply that it is a presentation of a few authors, including some written in the past, not a summary of an open discussion in the present day.

-- Chris Dent ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) https://anticdent.org/ freenode: cdent tw: @anticdent ____________________________________________________________

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