Open Stack

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 7:55 AM, Russell Bryant <rbryant at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 08/13/2014 05:57 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 08:57:40AM +1000, Michael Still wrote:
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> One of the action items from the nova midcycle was that I was asked to
>>> make nova's expectations of core reviews more clear. This email is an
>>> attempt at that.
>>>
>>> Nova expects a minimum level of sustained code reviews from cores. In
>>> the past this has been generally held to be in the order of two code
>>> reviews a day, which is a pretty low bar compared to the review
>>> workload of many cores. I feel that existing cores understand this
>>> requirement well, and I am mostly stating it here for completeness.
>
> Yep, this bit is obviously the most important.  I would prefer a good
> level of review activity be the only *hard* requirement.
>
>>> Additionally, there is increasing levels of concern that cores need to
>>> be on the same page about the criteria we hold code to, as well as the
>>> overall direction of nova. While the weekly meetings help here, it was
>>> agreed that summit attendance is really important to cores. Its the
>>> way we decide where we're going for the next cycle, as well as a
>>> chance to make sure that people are all pulling in the same direction
>>> and trust each other.
>>>
>>> There is also a strong preference for midcycle meetup attendance,
>>> although I understand that can sometimes be hard to arrange. My stance
>>> is that I'd like core's to try to attend, but understand that
>>> sometimes people will miss one. In response to the increasing
>>> importance of midcycles over time, I commit to trying to get the dates
>>> for these events announced further in advance.
>>
>> Personally I'm going to find it really hard to justify long distance
>> travel 4 times a year for OpenStack for personal / family reasons,
>> let alone company cost. I couldn't attend Icehouse mid-cycle because
>> I just had too much travel in a short time to be able to do another
>> week long trip away from family. I couldn't attend Juno mid-cycle
>> because it clashed we personal holiday. There are other opensource
>> related conferences that I also have to attend (LinuxCon, FOSDEM,
>> KVM Forum, etc), etc so doubling the expected number of openstack
>> conferences from 2 to 4 is really very undesirable from my POV.
>> I might be able to attend the occassional mid-cycle meetup if the
>> location was convenient, but in general I don't see myself being
>> able to attend them regularly.
>>
>> I tend to view the fact that we're emphasising the need of in-person
>> meetups to be somewhat of an indication of failure of our community
>> operation. The majority of open source projects work very effectively
>> with far less face-to-face time. OpenStack is fortunate that companies
>> are currently willing to spend 6/7-figure sums flying 1000's of
>> developers around the world many times a year, but I don't see that
>> lasting forever so I'm concerned about baking the idea of f2f midcycle
>> meetups into our way of life even more strongly.
>
> I'm concerned about this, as well.  There are lots of reasons people
> can't attend things (budget or personal reasons).  I'd hate to think
> that not being able to travel this much (which I think is *a lot*) hurts
> someone's ability to be an important part of the nova team.
> Unfortunately, that's the direction we're trending.
>

+1

I've seen a definitie uptick in travel for OpenStack, and it's not
sustainable for all the reasons stated here. We need to figure out a
better way to collaborate virtually, as we're a global Open Source
project and we can't assume that everyone can travel all the time for
all the mid-cycles, conferences, etc.


> I also think it furthers the image of nova being an exclusive clique.  I
> think we should always look at things as ways to be as inclusive as
> possible.  Focusing the important conversations at the 4 in-person
> meetups per year leaves most of the community out.
>

Again, I agree with this assessment. We need to shift things back to
the weekly IRC meetings, ML discussions, and perhaps some sort of
virtual conference scheduling as well.

>>> Given that we consider these physical events so important, I'd like
>>> people to let me know if they have travel funding issues. I can then
>>> approach the Foundation about funding travel if that is required.
>>
>> Travel funding is certainly an issue, but I'm not sure that Foundation
>> funding would be a solution, because the impact probably isn't directly
>> on the core devs. Speaking with my Red Hat on, if the midcycle meetup
>> is important enough, the core devs will likely get the funding to attend.
>> The fallout of this though is that every attendee at a mid-cycle summit
>> means fewer attendees at the next design summit. So the impact of having
>> more core devs at mid-cycle is that we'll get fewer non-core devs at
>> the design summit. This sucks big time for the non-core devs who want
>> to engage with our community.
>
> I can confirm that this is the effect I am seeing for our team.  There
> were *a lot* of meetups this cycle, and it was expensive.
>
> This was actually one of the arguments against splitting the design
> summit out from the main conference, yet I'm afraid we've created the
> problem anyway.
>
>> Also having each team do a f2f mid-cycle meetup at a different location
>> makes it even harder for people who have a genuine desire / need to take
>> part in multiple teams. Going to multiple mid-cycle meetups is even more
>> difficult to justify so they're having to make difficult decisions about
>> which to go to :-(
>
> Indeed, and we actually need to be strongly *encouraging* cross-project
> participation.
>
>> I'm also not a fan of mid-cycle meetups because I feel it further
>> stratifies our contributors into two increasly distinct camps - core
>> vs non-core.
>>
>> I can see that a big benefit of a mid-cycle meetup is to be a focal
>> point for collaboration, to forcably break contributors our of their
>> day-to-day work pattern to concentrate on discussing specific issues.
>> It also obviously solves the distinct timezone problem we have with
>> our dispersed contributor base. I think that we should be examining
>> what we can achieve with some kind of virtual online mid-cycle meetups
>> instead. Using technology like google hangouts or some similar live
>> collaboration technology, not merely an IRC discussion. Pick a 2-3
>> day period, schedule formal agendas / talking slots as you would with
>> a physical summit and so on. I feel this would be more inclusive to
>> our community as a whole, avoid excessive travel costs, so allowing
>> more of our community to attend the bigger design summits. It would
>> even open possibility of having multiple meetups during a cycle (eg
>> could arrange mini virtual events around each milestone if we wanted)
>
> I think this is a nice concrete suggestion for an alternative.  I think
> it's worth exploring in more detail.  I would much prefer something like
> this as a replacement for the mid-cycle stuff and save the in-person
> meetings for the existing twice-per-year summits.
>
I'd like to see this option used as well and see how it works out.

> --
> Russell Bryant
>
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