Define process for emergency Steering decisions

[jberkus]

Problem Statement

One thing the Slack Downgrade Crisis showed us is that we don't have a defined process for how Steering can approve things in an urgent situation where polling, or having a meeting, of all of Steering isn't practical. It seems likely that we will someday have another crisis on a weekend, holiday, or during Kubecon, and need this.

Proposed Solution

We should write a handbook for how decisions can be approved when only a minority of steering is available and time is of the essence.

[pohly]

We discussed this in the private steering meeting today, but need to continue the discussion when other members are back.

My personal two cents in the meantime: we have ways of reaching members also during the weekend on additional communication channels, so if there really is a crisis and it's clear that we need quorum for a decision, then there are ways to achieve this already.

[BenTheElder]

My personal two cents in the meantime: we have ways of reaching members also during the weekend on additional communication channels, so if there really is a crisis and it's clear that we need quorum for a decision, then there are ways to achieve this already.

+1.

Also, to be clear we have two decision making processes:

1. "Routine Business", which requires only a simple majority, or four of the seven members.
2. Specific non-routine processes including changes to steering's own charter and forced "no confidence" removal of members

2) should not be done without the stricter requirements.

The specific case here would fall under "routine business", where we only need to get consensus from four of our seven members.

If steering is formally contacted via any of our listed communication channels then steering members can and have escalated to each other via other means to drive quicker awareness. We maintain close contact within the committee and collectively monitor requests.

IIRC in this particular instance there wasn't a specific request to steering via any of the listed channels over the weekend, and from my POV community forums had already been delegated to contribex and only a request to escalate to steering would've changed that.

[jberkus]

So it sounds like this just needs HOWTO documentation that other teams are aware of?