Mark McLoughlin delivered the Red Hat Keynote, on the morning of the second day of the Openstack Summit in Vancouver.
During the afternoon, he delivered a more intimate talk about the governance of the Openstack project.
The main idea is that, the new Big Tent organization model will allow the emergence of new projects, and it can be the time to redefine the main values that will help the project contributors to take the good decisions.
Mark started his talk refering to the Keynote Eben Moglen gave in Auckland at LCA 2015. In this keynote, Eben Moglen explained that the hierarchical organization model that we all know very well, is the model of the 20th century, and that the organization of the 21st century will be based on transparency, participation and non-hierarchical collaboration, like it is in free software.
Mark continued his introduction with a reference to Andy Hunt’s blog post, The Failure of Agile. Andy Hunt is one of the original writer of the agile manifesto, so when it came to discuss agile, we can at least consider him seriously. The main point of this article is that a lot of people lot’s the agile way by focusing on a set of practices, forgeting the agile values and principles. They are focused on doing agile, and they forgot that depending on your experience, if your are a beginer in a practice, you need clear directives to learn how things work, and more and more your skills are developing you will need coaching on the go, and then you will need some support, and then you will be fully autonomous and during this journey you will have adapted the initial set of practices living the agile values and principles.
That reminds me the stickers I had printed for an agile conference:
When I recieved the stikers at this point, I was thinking… humm I should have crossed also “be” and put “learn” instead… because this is really what we are doing here…
So Mark proposed those 4 high level ideas that can become the high level principles we can refer to as an Openstack contributor :
diverse interests, but a shared vision, based on consensus
individuals and interactions over processes and tools
leadership through empowerment, empathy and trust
every advance must ultimately iterate from the bottom up
And I encourage you to watch the talk to understand the details of his proposal.