Principia / DevOps / leadership and governance

Daniel Holbach daniel.holbach at ubuntu.com
Mon May 30 14:03:46 UTC 2011


Hello everybody,

Am 27.05.2011 19:04, schrieb Mark Shuttleworth:
> Right now, this is all embryonic, so I don't want to create a large
> group. But I do want us to signal (a) that this is part of Ubuntu, and
> (b) who to go to for resolution of technical and social issues related
> to Principia and Ensemble. So I think we should create a Principia
> Council, with a chair, appointed by the CC.
> 
> I think the focus needed here is different to the leadership that the TB
> currently provides - this work will be very cloud and devops specific,
> and we'll want a team which reflects that. It will also be very
> day-to-day, this is a fast-moving area, and it needs more hands-on
> guidance than the TB can provide directly. I would be happy for this
> group to be accountable to the TB on technical matters, though I think
> this group should also be able to grant Ubuntu membership to
> contributors which is a function the CC delegates.
> 
> As a lead, I would nominate Clint Byrum, a member of the Server Team
> with a passion for devops who's taken to Ensemble like a duck to water.
> As other members of the Principia Council, I would nominate Yuan Negron
> and Marc Cluet, who work in Canonical helping large deployments of
> Ubuntu. Clint is an Ubuntu Member but I don't think either Yuan or Marc
> are, yet. Nevertheless, the field is so embryonic that I think it is
> appropriate to bootstrap in this fashion.
> 
> I would think they could build a team of core Principia contributors who
> in future could help confirm nominations to the Principia Council, but
> again, for bootstrapping purposes I think we need to JFDI this initial
> appointment.

I think it's great that the Principia world wants to take a structured,
process-driven approach to building their community and putting
leadership in place in the beginning sounds like a good idea.

Are there any more detailed plans on how governance is exactly going to
work in this part of the community already?

AFAIUI we are going to have kind of a steering committee that will help
to make decisions about the direction of the project and agree on who
can immediately contribute to it? If that's what the plan is, I have no
objections at all - that's more well-defined than most other projects
start and technical and ACL decisions are part of every other project as
well.

In this thread the question came up if Principia was part of the Ubuntu
community or not. I personally welcome the efforts and see them as
welcome contributions to Ubuntu: immediately and by spreading it more
widely in the world.

As others pointed out this is the first case where we set up the
governance before and I can see why some would be a bit hesitant where
Principia governance would make decisions that are directly related to
Ubuntu governance (ie. granting Ubuntu membership).

The reason I generally support this is that over time in lots of part of
the Ubuntu community we saw the need to recognise contributors and allow
them to vote on decisions and become part of the organisational part of
their community at some stage. It will be interesting to see how a
project fares that has put all of this into place right from the start.

To build confidence, I would very much encourage

 - Marc and Yuan to go for Ubuntu membership before they are
   in a position to make decisions about other contributors'
   Ubuntu membership.
 - future Principia governance to share notes (ie. reports) early on
   already and probably catch up regularly to iron out problems quickly
   and help others to support Principia governance effectively.

Generally I support the idea and think with the two measures above in
place I would be confident that the right steps are taken to grow a
great new part of the community with everybody on the same page.

Have a great day,
 Daniel

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