[openstack-dev] stackforge projects are not second class citizens

Adrian Otto adrian.otto at rackspace.com
Thu Jun 18 14:07:41 UTC 2015


Joe,

I must respectfully disagree. The statistics you used to indicate that Magnum did not benefit from joining the tent are not telling the whole story. Facts:

1) When we had our Midcycle just before joining OpenStack in March we had 24 contributors from 13 affiliations when we joined. You were there, remember? We now have 55 contributors from 22 affiliations.

2) There is a ramp time in the number of reviews and commits that newcomers offer. You don't just show up and drop 10 new commits a day. Most of our new contributors have just joined the effort. I can tell by their behavior that they are gearing up to participate in a more meaningful way. They are showing up at team meetings, discussing blueprints, discussing issues on the ML, and just staring to work on a few bugs. I am sure that commits are are trailing indicator of engagement, not a leading one.

3) Contributors who participated the most in the last cycle are not producing as many reviews this time around. Several of them are working on productization strategy and execution to bring related next generation cloud services to market. This focus happens downstream, not upstream. The top commit contributors this cycle are from HP and Intel, who were only minimally involved before we joined OpenStack.

4) As a project proceeds through maturation, commit velocity decreases as the complexity of new features increases. We picked the low hanging fruit for Magnum, and now we are focusing on harder work that requires more planning and collaboration, and less blasting out of "try this" code. Our quality expectations are higher now.

Joining worked for Magnum.

When you stay in Stackforge, you have a limited window of time to build community, and then it fades. You don't need to look far to find examples of that. Our community certainly does treat Stackforge projects as second class. The process of starting Magnum reaffirmed that fact for me. I even have reviews where I was explicitly told in -1 vote comments that Stackforge was a second class and that was the point of it. Unfortunately Stackforge's reputation has been fouled because of the way we have treated it. I don't think that can be fixed. Once you are labeled a tramp, you don't recover from that socially. Stackforge is our tramp now, like it or not. Big Tent is our opportunity to build an inclusive community right. Let's not go changing it before we have given it a fair chance first.

Thanks,

Adrian

On Jun 15, 2015, at 3:25 AM, Joe Gordon <joe.gordon0 at gmail.com<mailto:joe.gordon0 at gmail.com>> wrote:

One of the stated problems the 'big tent' is supposed to solve is:

'The binary nature of the integrated release results in projects outside the integrated release failing to get the recognition they deserve. "Non-official" projects are second- or third-class citizens which can't get development resources. Alternative solutions can't emerge in the shadow of the blessed approach. Becoming part of the integrated release, which was originally designed to be a technical decision, quickly became a life-or-death question for new projects, and a political/community minefield.' [0]

Meaning projects should see an uptick in development once they drop their second-class citizenship and join OpenStack. Now that we have been living in the world of the big tent for several months now, we can see if this claim is true.

Below is a list of the first few few projects to join OpenStack after the big tent, All of which have now been part of OpenStack for at least two months.[1]

* Mangum -  Tue Mar 24 20:17:36 2015
* Murano - Tue Mar 24 20:48:25 2015
* Congress - Tue Mar 31 20:24:04 2015
* Rally - Tue Apr 7 21:25:53 2015

When looking at stackalytics [2] for each project, we don't see any noticeably change in number of reviews, contributors, or number of commits from before and after each project joined OpenStack.

So what does this mean? At least in the short term moving from Stackforge to OpenStack does not result in an increase in development resources (too early to know about the long term).  One of the three reasons for the big tent appears to be unfounded, but the other two reasons hold.  The only thing I think this information changes is what peoples expectations should be when applying to join OpenStack.

[0] https://github.com/openstack/governance/blob/master/resolutions/20141202-project-structure-reform-spec.rst
[1] Ignoring OpenStackClent since the repos were always in OpenStack it just didn't have a formal home in the governance repo.
[2] h<http://stackalytics.com/?module=openstackclient-group&metric=commits>http://stackalytics.com/?module=magnum-group&metric=commits
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