Open Stack

On 03/02/2016 02:37 PM, Edgar Magana wrote:
> The Foundation User Committee [1] has received multiple requests to
> enable a formal recognition of your contributions to the OpenStack
> community. This email is our approach to formalize this recognition and
> make sure that we all feel and are part of the community.

Thank you! This is a much needed conversation that has been waiting to
happen for years now.

> There are many ways that OpenStack users contribute to the community
> beyond standard patches.

Amen!

> We want to make this a reality by gathering a list of criteria that we
> as a community feel that shows someone  has demonstrated technical
> contributions, using their skills as Ops. Our current ideas are as follows:
> 
>   * Moderating a session at an Ops meetup

Love this one! It's a naturally peer-reviewed position and provides lots
of value. Easy, too.

>   * Filing a detailed bug, tagged 'ops', that gets fixed

I'd iterate on this one... Not all good, detailed bugs get fixed
upstream, for multiple reason. I'd say that any bug with instructions to
reproduce and maybe an attached fix should be considered.

IMHO one of the unnecessary obstacles that OpenStack puts to operators
willing to fix an issue is forcing to gerrit review process on top of
every single patch. Since code reviews cannot be avoided though, I would
propose that operators, whose job is not to participate in online
debates over the validity of a fix that 'works-for-me', should be
allowed to file a bug, post the fix on the bug and let a dev 'adopt'
that fix (assuming the bug at least is valid). This way the operator can
move on and still be recognized for a technical contribution.

>   * Filling out the user survey (including a deployment)

This looks like it can be too easily abused. In the end, there may be
tens of operators for a single deployment...

>   * Making contributions to ops-tags and/or OSOps repositories

This should have been done yesterday, honestly.

>   * Being an active moderator on Ask OpenStack

As before, should have been done yesterday. When I was the owner, there
were technical limitations... now those in theory could be gone since
Marton added support for OpenStackID but they're not merged yet. Ask
OpenStack is in a strange position though, I'm not even sure who owns
that project nowadays.

>   * Actively participating in a user commitee working group

Amen

>   * Contributing a post to Superuser magazine

Easy to do too.

>   * Giving a presentation or track chairing for the Operations track at
>     the conference

Good idea and easy fix: track chairs and presenters get a free ticket
but no technical badge.

>   * Hosting OpenStack Meetups

Uhm ... this looks good in theory but in practice I know there are
different levels of quality in those meetings. Probably we need to
complete the work on defining the 'official openstack user groups' first
on https://groups.openstack.org/official-group-process.

> Here's what we would like to happen:
> 
>  1. We discuss and converge on these initial criteria and make a list of
>     eligible members

Missing from this list are people who contribute translations. Those are
valuable contributions too. In the past we couldn't get the list of
translators because of limitations in the tool we used... but now we
have them:

http://stackalytics.com/?metric=translations

> *This needs a catchy name.*
> Yes, yes it does. Suggestions?

I suggest not to create a separate category, and reuse ATC. Active
Technical Contributor always meant to include any contribution of
technical nature, including legal, operations, documentation, user
stories, etc. Creating a new name risks TLA proliferation (it's a thing)
and exacerbate the "us vs them" that already exists. ATCs would already
know that they are operators, doc writers, UX experts, marketers,
translators, developers, laywers etc and all have their own venues to
meet and discuss among their peers.

/stef