Open Stack

On 04/29/15 17:28, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> Excerpts from Maish Saidel-Keesing's message of 2015-04-29 12:59:35 +0300:
>> Again my apologies for the incorrect format - since I am still not
>> receiving the messages from this thread.
>>
>> Please see my comments with the abstracts within (unfortunately not
>> necessarily in the correct order)
>>
>> I think that the point here was that Doug mentioned that there was
>> communication
>>
>>> /  > I believe all of the posts were on the main OpenStack foundation blog
>> />/  > under the "technical committee" tag [1], and they also went to
>> />/  > planet.openstack.org for folks who subscribe to the entire community
>> />/  > feed.
>> />/
>> /
>>
>> Doug - evidently this is not working as it should. As Chris said as well
>> - the posts are not tagged and are not regular.
> The lack of tags is an oversight, and should be easy to correct.
>
>> Regarding this
>>
>>> /For outgoing communication, during Kilo (and possibly Juno) we tried
>> />/blogging meeting summaries. Did folks notice? Were the posts useful?/
>>
>> They were not noticed - because they didn't really happen.
> I don't think that's a fair characterization of the effort put into
> writing the posts. If you didn't see them because they didn't go to the
> right channel, that's one thing. If you didn't see them because there
> weren't enough of them, then I think we have different goals. I'm not
> sure it's as useful to publish on a schedule as it is to publish at
> meaningful milestones.
Perhaps I came across too strong, that was not my intention. The posts 
were there, maybe not as publicized as well as they could have been, and 
not as frequent as they could have been, which is why I think it is 
great that Chris brought this up.
> If we take this week's meeting [1] as an example, we made some
> clarifications to existing rules for teams that want to join as
> official OpenStack projects [2]; we tweaked the description of the
> Congress project [3] to try to convey what it is for; we approved
> 5 repos as part of existing projects [4][5][6][7][8]; we updated
> the PTLs for projects [9]; and then we discussed the cross-project
> track at the summit.
>
> It's not clear those things warrant blog posts.  Maybe they do, but
> aside from the summit planning, and possibly the meeting rule
> clarification, the others seem trivial enough that they would be
> "noise" in a channel we should preserve for communicating more
> "important" changes. I honestly don't know. If I was going to write a
> blog post about that meeting, which topics would you want me to have
> included?
>
> [1] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2015/tc.2015-04-28-20.02.log.html
> [2] https://review.openstack.org/175427
> [3] https://review.openstack.org/169480
> [4] https://review.openstack.org/175620
> [5] https://review.openstack.org/172802
> [6] https://review.openstack.org/175610
> [7] https://review.openstack.org/177070
> [8] https://review.openstack.org/176338
> [9] https://review.openstack.org/175007
I do not know either, that is something that should be agreed upon.
>
>> Excerpts from Chris Dent's message of 2015-04-27 17:32:12 +0100:
>>> /  The only way I've been able to get any sense of what the TC might be
>> />/  up to is by watching the governance project on gerrit and that tends
>> />/  to be too soon and insufficiently summarized and thus a fair bit of
>> />/  work to separate the details from the destinations./
>>
>> If the audience that you are planning on communicating with is: not the
>> developers themselves and those who are already heavily involved in the
>> community - I think this certainly is not the place to publicize
>> changes. Do you seriously expect people who are trying to find
>> information (not as a regular code contributor) about what is going on
>> to start delving through Gerrit?
> We have two audiences. The contributors who elect us, and the broader
> community of deployers, users, etc. I think all of us do what we
> can individually to engage with that broader community, through
> meetups, our own blogs, and other channels. I don't expect them to
> use or read gerrit, or even necessarily subscribe to this list.
>
> On the other hand, the developer electorate is quite capable of
> subscribing to notices about changes happening in the governance
> repository and it does seem reasonable that if they really want to
> watch the minutia of TC's deliberations that they *would* take advantage
> of that capability. That's not to say it should be the only way we
> communicate, just that the option is there for those interested in using
> it.
I don't think that we are talking about the developer electorate here, 
they already know how this works. It is trying to make this accessible 
to those others that are not aware of the intricacies of OpenStack.
>> Not going to happen.
>> Does this mean that the TC has to change the way they make decisions?
>> The TC should do what what they find works for them. But they also need
>> to take into consideration that there are others who are interested in
>> the information - but have no idea how to access it.
>> We need make this more accessible - to those who are not like us.
> Yes, I don't think anyone is arguing against that point.
>
> The question remains, though: How? Is a blog post a useful medium,
> or should we be doing something else?
>
>> Excerpts from Jeremy Stanley's message of 2015-04-28 16:21:17 +0000:
>>> /  On 2015-04-28 16:30:21 +0100 (+0100), Chris Dent wrote:
>> />/  [...]
>> />/  > What's important to avoid is the blog postings being only reporting of
>> />/  > "conclusions". They also need to be invitations to participate in the
>> />/  > discussions. Yes, the mailing list, gerrit and meeting logs have some
>> />/  > of the ongoing discussions but often, without a nudge, people won't
>> />/  > know.
>> />/  [...]
>> />/
>> />/  Perhaps better visibility for the meeting agenda would help? As in
>> />/  "these are the major topics we're planning to cover in the upcoming
>> />/  meeting, everyone is encouraged to attend" sort of messaging?
>> />/  Blogging that might be a bit obnoxious, not really sure (I'm one of
>> />/  those luddites who prefer mailing lists to blogs so tend not to
>> />/  follow the latter anyway).
>> /
>>
>> I am not sure that you want people chiming in every single TC meeting -
>> that will become quite chaotic.
> We regularly have non-TC members attend and participate in the meetings.
>
>> Excerpts from Chris Dent's message of Tue Apr 28 15:30:21 UTC 2015
>>
>>> I'm not trying to suggest that the TC is trying to keep people in
>>> the dark, rather that it always takes more effort than anyone would
>>> like to make sure things are lit.
>> I don't think that anyone is implying that you are saying that the TC is
>> keeping it to themselves. I for one would also like to see more
>> communication coming out of the TC.
>> And yes it does take effort.
> Taking as given that we should be open and communicate more, I would
> like to ask a concrete question.  It seems like there is a general
> sense of concern about communication, but I want to make sure it's
> not related to ongoing discussions.  Is there something specific
> that happened over the last year that was a surprise, or that was
> not communicated well? Something we could address in the short term
> with a blog post or email discussion?
How about the fact that the definition of an ATC was changed [1] for a 
free Summit pass? [2]

>
>> Excerpts from Chris Dent's message of Tue Apr 28 18:11:44 UTC 2015
>>
>>> I wouldn't have joined the commentary on the blogging issue if there
>>> hadn't already been a fair bit of talk about how fixing the feedback
>>> loop was one of the roads to improving. Also, critically, when Doug
>>> (who I can see is just trying to point out the current picture of
>>> reality so I'm not criticizing him, in fact I'd like to laud his
>>> efforts in pursuit of "write it down" which he has mentioned many
>>> times) pointed out the existing situation there were, effectively, bugs:
>>>
>>> * disconnected taxonomy in the presentation of the blogs
>>> * misconceptions about the frequency of postings
>>>
>>> If we can clear up those preconceptions then we can find the stable
>>> state from which improvements can be made.
>> I fully agree!
>>
>>> It is true that I have dissatisfaction about the visibility of the
>>> TC and I think a lot of the candidates have made it clear that they
>>> are concerned with that issue too. That's great!
>>>
>>>> /  It is detrimental to our overall electoral process if folks cloak
>> /> >/  personal points of disagreement in the guise of open discussion.
>> />
>>> I would think that disagreements are in fact exactly the reason for
>>> having open discussion and such discussion is one of the best ways
>>> to know where people stand. I didn't, however, have that in mind
>>> when I responded to clarify things with Doug.
> For what it's worth, I'm not reading this discussion as us disagreeing
> in any way. We made some reasonable starts at publicizing our ongoing
> work, but it's clear we can do better from a technical standpoint
> (tagging posts) and from a volume standpoint (publishing more often).
> I'm interested in having more input into how best to improve
> communication, so I keep asking questions and I'm glad you're all still
> answering. :-)
>
>>> Apparently my efforts to be lighthearted about that didn't quite
>>> play as I planned, and for that I apologize. As I was looking for
>>> blog postings I found so _few_ that I assumed any statements of
>>> there's 3 here and 4 over there[1] (covering the last greater than a
>>> year) were similarly lighthearted. I guess my expectations are way
>>> off?
> Er, yeah, if the "3 or 4" part was meant somewhat jokingly I missed
> that in my reading of your email because it was pretty close to the
> actual count and *I* was surprised.  I thought we had done more.
>
> Doug
>
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[1] 
https://ask.openstack.org/en/question/45531/atc-pass-for-the-openstack-summit/
[2] 
https://www.mail-archive.com/openstack-infra@lists.openstack.org/msg01430.html

-- 
Best Regards,
Maish Saidel-Keesing