[Openstack-operators] [LCOO] Intro to Large Contributing

Jeremy Stanley fungi at yuggoth.org
Thu Feb 9 16:29:52 UTC 2017


On 2017-02-09 00:59:52 +0000 (+0000), UKASICK, ANDREW wrote:
[...]
> I'm the mysterious "AndyU" who was chatting with you about a year
> ago in IRC with questions about how to go about donating hosted
> cloud resources for use by the Infra team. It's nice to bump into
> you again! ;-) That idea is still stirring btw, but has been much
> slower moving than I'd hoped.
[...]

Always appreciated, and happy to pick that back up if and when
you're ready.

> I've been having a pretty lengthy conversation with jay Pipes
> regarding similar questions. You can catch up on that in the
> thread below this one.

I've been following it closely, and tried not to duplicate
questions/comments as much as possible.

> LCOO is unlike any other working groups that I'm familiar with in
> some significant ways. You zero'd in on one of those in your
> statements above about companies joining as opposed to
> individuals. In that regard, LCOO is similar to an entity like
> OSIC.org as opposed to a traditional working group.
[...]

This is probably where some of the confusion comes in for me; I
expect it's just one of terminology/semantics. The OpenStack User
Committee has specifically tied "Active members and contributors to
functional teams and/or working groups" to its electorate in their
charter, and also defines working groups as "teams" (which to me
implies they're made up of individuals, not organizations):

    https://governance.openstack.org/uc/reference/charter.html

Maybe LCOO is something other than a "working group" in the formal
UC sense? Or maybe the organizations who participate in the LCOO
designate representatives (those LCOO "organization coordinators"
and "governance board" mentioned in your wiki article) who are the
actual working group as far as the UC is concerned? I'm just
concerned if, for example, all employees within AT&T suddenly become
part of the UC electorate by way of AT&T as an organization being an
active "member" of an official UC working group. The only way I can
really see this working is if the UC insists that its working groups
are made up of individuals and not whole organizations.

> Jira provides Kanban boards that can serve as a kind of dashboard
> allowing us to visualize activity and current status of Community
> activity. But that activity is still happening in Launchpad,
> Gerrit, etc.
[...]

Cool, so it sounds like StoryBoard may work out for you in the
long-run. It already has kanban and worklist support with optional
automation tied directly to defect/feature tracking and code review.
As the current effort to move our community from launchpad.net to
storyboard.openstack.org progresses over the next couple of
development cycles, I encourage you to check it out and start
thinking about whether its features address your needs (or consider
pitching in on further development there).

> Automating the status updating is something I've begun to discuss
> within the PWG's "Story Tracker" team. We have the same challenge
> there.
[...]

Our hope is that once we get further along with the current
migration blockers for StoryBoard, we'll implement an "epics"
concept in it which ties individual stories and their tasksets to
over-arching efforts where their progress can be tracked more
holistically.

> BTW, Atlassian has always made their tools free for use by open
> source projects. Also, although they're commercial products they
> do provide the source code and allow users to modify it freely
> which makes them much more open-source-ish than most.
[...]

<soapbox>
Yes, I saw you mention it in the other ML thread. "Free as in beer"
is a somewhat dirty concept in free software development circles,
and our community infrastructure similarly eschews gratis services
like GitHub in favor of libre alternatives (we provide read-only
mirrors there on request, but don't rely on it in any of our
automation and officially recommend git.openstack.org which runs
entirely on free software).

As an author of free software myself I prefer when people use and
help improve OpenStack rather than supporting commercial/proprietary
solutions to accomplish the same tasks, and so think it hypocritical
to not extend the same courtesy to other free software communities
who are attempting to overcome similar hurdles in their respective
problem spaces. To quote Harry Tuttle, "We're all in it together."
</soapbox>

I understand you'll probably end up using whatever tools you're
familiar/comfortable with and which help you accomplish your goals,
I just ask that you keep in mind that publicly recommending non-free
tools in the service of free software development sets an example.
OpenStack already has a slightly negative reputation as "not really
free" in the wider community... one which we're desperately trying
to overcome, bit by bit.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 949 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-operators/attachments/20170209/afd5a1dd/attachment.pgp>


More information about the OpenStack-operators mailing list