[VOTE PROPOSAL] Weekly OTC meeting until 3.0 beta1 is released

[Nicola Tuveri]

I received no feedback, so I am keeping the vote text as proposed and
opening the vote shortly.


Nicola

On Wed, 7 Oct 2020 at 16:53, Nicola Tuveri <nic.tuv at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Background
> ----------
>
> Since the two virtual face-to-face OTC meetings of last week, and again
> in the two OTC meetings this week, we repeatedly discussed replacing the
> weekly "developer meetings" with official OTC meetings.
>
> The "developer meetings" have so far seen frequent participation from a
> subset of OTC members heavily involved in day to day tasks for the
> [`3.0 New Core + FIPS` project][new_core+FIPS], and have been open and
> advertised to all OTC members since the end of January, but they were
> not qualified as official OTC meetings: they were meant to assess the
> weekly progress within the project, and determine the coming week's
> priorities, discussing and resolving any difficulties encountered.
>
> Rationale
> ---------
>
> At this point in the development process, in which we are refining the
> state of development branch to finally qualify for the transition into
> the beta release stage, upgrading these meetings to proper OTC meetings
> seems appropriate and desirable, as discussion and assessment of the
> remaining technical tasks increasingly requires discussion within the
> OTC and OTC decisions, and additionally provides OTC steering on the
> preferred way of completing some of the allocated tasks before the work
> is done, rather than after the fact.
>
> Personally, I also expect that upgrading the developer meetings into
> full-fledged OTC meetings will increase attendance by the wider OTC
> audience: this would provide the OTC as a whole with better oversight on
> the progress towards the upcoming release, and would further improve the
> quality of the release process by leveraging the plurality of OTC
> perspectives and insights.
>
> Meeting Schedule
> ----------------
>
> So far, the "developer meetings" have been regularly scheduled each
> Tuesday from 08:00 to 09:30 (UTC, 24h format), with a tendency to spill
> into the next half-hour.
> There have been cases in which we had to hit the 3h mark, but I wouldn't
> describe 3h as the norm.
> My proposal for the OTC meeting is to adopt the same 1h30m (+30m buffer)
> approach.
> Tuesday, 08:00 UTC as the starting time, has been so far a good
> compromise between folks working in European and Australian timezone,
> and keeping it is the current proposal, but is admittedly not the best
> time for attendance from the American continents.
>
> Vote: why and when?
> -------------------
>
> We are proposing a vote, rather than agreeing on it during the last
> call, to invite discussion from the OTC members that could not
> participate in the meetings during these two weeks, for example
> regarding alternative time slots to improve overall attendance.
>
> I plan to wait until Friday to open the actual vote: please provide
> feedback before then if you would like to amend the letter of the vote
> topic.
>
> One item on which I'd like to ask for feedback is if the actual vote
> text should include the specifics of the timeslot or not.
>
> Proposed vote text
> ------------------
>
>         Hold online weekly OTC meetings starting on Tuesday 2020-10-13
>         and until 3.0 beta1 is released, in lieu of the weekly
>         "developer meetings".
>
> Refs
> ----
>
> [new_core+FIPS]: https://github.com/openssl/openssl/projects/2