[all][foundation][ecosystem] External projects under the foundation hat

Artem Goncharov artem.goncharov at gmail.com
Fri Jun 24 18:01:09 UTC 2022



> 
> I feel like that is kind of a defeatist attitude- that we shouldn't keep new contributors to OpenStack in mind. There are new people
> coming in every round of outreachy, every semester at NDSU, BU, Northwestern... I am in contact with 3 more universities since 
> the Berlin summit looking to form similar relationships with us. That's not nothing?

That’s not nothing, but those are not long-term contributors requiring huge mentoring effort from us. Therefore this is not something I would take into account for this particular discussion. This is more about customers and operators of OpenStack based clouds

> 
> If the process of getting started becomes more complex, I think we will struggle even more to get new people involved and build
> them into the next generation of contributors to step up when the current folks have to/ want to move on. Many projects already
> have a very short bench and I can only see fracturing our development processes as making it harder to build up the number of
> contributors we have to support our teams and those that have been in leadership roles so long they are looking to step down soon.
> 

This way block those for whom our process is too complex from using easier approach. Or initially I also raised the point that sometimes it may be just not applicable due to particular regulations

I barely remember any of the mentioned students that we able to go through getting accounts and gerrit managed within few days. And from my experience unless someone experienced is sitting and helping out it is far away from intuitive. The problem actually start from the point that it is not intuitive how to find the beginning. Even now for the sake of experiment it took me around 3 minutes knowing which particular document I am searching to get to it. Now I am at the way crossing: do I use https://docs.openstack.org/doc-contrib-guide/quickstart/first-timers.html <https://docs.openstack.org/doc-contrib-guide/quickstart/first-timers.html>, https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute <https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute>, https://docs.opendev.org/opendev/infra-manual/latest/developers.html#development-workflow <https://docs.opendev.org/opendev/infra-manual/latest/developers.html#development-workflow>  or https://docs.openstack.org/contributors/users/index.html <https://docs.openstack.org/contributors/users/index.html> ? I bet we can find more docs. Depending on your entry point you will end up on different documents with different doc bugs. Then once you see those documents you may want to run away just from their complexity and amount of required steps. I feel this is really overwhelming how much you need to go through before you start at least understanding what you really need to do. This is likely not the case for any of us here, because we know how it works. But that IS the case for newcomers. I feel it is not complex to cope with gerrit, but rather getting all things set up is what make people frightened.

Please do not treat my statement as some form of blaming what infra folks are doing or anything else. We have huge amount of work done, tons of docs and already this is better than not having them. But most of our docs are created by developers who are known not to be good at writing good documentation. Those other enterprise companies are spending millions of __your_currency_here__ to polish user experience and make sure newcomer does not end up on broken process because this is what is generating their money income.

Back to the point:

- can we have official OpenStack projects outside opendev? [yes/no]
- can we have non-official OpenStack projects (lets call them affiliated) not hosted on opendev under *some* OpenStack governance? [yes/no]
- can we have OpenStack manage *git* organisation (i.e. GitHub organisation) as well as artifacts publishing for those outside of opendev as some form of limited governance? This may or may not include some more regulations regarding PTI, code-review, etc. Purpose is to improve marketing side of the delivery and be able to revive it once current maintainers depart [yes/no]
- can we provide Zuul gating for those official or affiliated projects outside of opendev (with strict regulations what and how)? [yes/no]
- can we _think_ on allowing people use alternative public auth providers (i.e. GitHub, ...) accounts with OpenStack to lower the entry barrier? [yes/no]

The questions above are not technical at the moment, but rather legal. It is required to clarify law before we even can start thinking who and how.


-Artem

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