[openstack-dev] [all][tc] Moving away from "big tent" terminology

Flavio Percoco flavio at redhat.com
Mon Jun 19 11:32:48 UTC 2017


On 16/06/17 04:32 +0000, gordon chung wrote:
>
>
>On 15/06/17 06:28 PM, Doug Hellmann wrote:
>>> i see, so this is less an existential question of 'what is openstack'
>>> > and more 'how to differentiate governance projects from a random repo
>>> > created last weekend'
>>> >
>>> > this might have been just me, but big tent was exactly 'big tent ==
>>> > governance' so when i read 'moving away from "big tent"' i think 'what
>>> > is this *new* thing we're moving to and if we're redefining this new
>>> > thing, what for?'. it seems this is not the case.
>> No. We're trying to pick new words, because there continues to be
>> confusion about the old words.
>
>my bad, apologies for taking the scenic route. regardless of new words,
>we failed to properly describe what the big tent was the first go to
>some people, how do we make sure they're not confused this time? and how
>do we not confuse the ones that did understand the first time?
>
>for me personally, the first go, the messaging was kind of muddled. i
>remember 'level playing field' being used frequently. not sure if that's
>still one of the reasons for <new label>?
>
>>> >
>>> > sorry, i probably wasn't clear, i simply noticed that it was a corporate
>>> > sponsor that was misusing the 'big tent' name so was just thinking we
>>> > could easily tell them, that's not what it means. wasn't suggesting
>>> > anything else by sponsor comment.
>> You'd think it would be that easy. A surprising number of folks
>> within the community don't really understand the old naming either,
>> though (see the rest of this thread for examples).
>
>*sigh* so this is why we can't have nice things :p
>
>as an aside, in telemetry project, we did something somewhat similar
>when we renamed/rebranded to telemetry from ceilometer. we wrote several
>notes to the ML, had a few blog posts, fixed the docs, mentioned the new
>project structure in our presentations... 2 years on, we still
>occasionally get asked "what's ceilometer", "is xyz not ceilometer?", or
>"so ceilometer is deprecated?". to a certain extent i think we'll have
>to be prepared to do some hand holding and say "hey, that's not what the
>"big tent/<new label>."

Is it clear to these people, once you explain the difference, what telemetry is?

I would assume it is and this is one of the problems we're trying to solve. Even
after explaining the difference, it's sometimes hard for people to grasp the
concept because the naming that was used is poor and, to be honest, it feels
like it came out from an analogy without properly considering the impact it
would have in the community.

Over-communicating won't get rid of surprises but sometimes the problem is in
the message and not the receivers of it. We must stay honest with ourselves.

Flavio

--
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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