On 25/02/2019 11:24, Chris Dent wrote:
On Thu, 21 Feb 2019, Alexandra Settle wrote:
Well hello again!
Hello!
Hello!
I'm going for hello-inception. Unsure if it will catch on or not.
While you address this question to developers and recognise that there are many different types of contributors, I think documentation sits in a weird loop hole here. We are often considered developers because we follow developmental workflows, and integrate with the projects directly. Some of us are more technical than others and contribute to both the code base and to the physical documentation. Risking a straw man here: How would you define the technical writers that work for OpenStack? We too are often considered "OpenStack" writers and experts, yet as I say, we are not experts on every project.
I'd hesitate to define anyone. Technical writers, developers, users, deployers and all the other terms we can come up with for people who are involved in the OpenStack community are all individuals and do things that overlap in many roles.
+1
I was reluctant to use the term developer in my original question because it's not a term I like because it is so frequently used to designate a priesthood which has special powers (and rewards and obligations) different from a (lesser) laity. Which is crap. Not as crap as "software engineer" but still crap.
I actually laughed at this, you're quite right. Developers are often still seen as magical beings with strange powers that make the fun screen go bright. There's an air of *mystery* surrounding developers.
But I used it to try to forestall any "who do you mean" and "who does the TC represent" questions, which, upon reflection, might have been good questions to debate. Technical writers, and developers, and everyone else who is involved in the OpenStack community are co-authors of this thing which we call OpenStack. From my standpoint the thing we are authoring, and hope to keep alive, is the community and the style of collaboration we use in it. The thing that people run clouds with and companies sell is sort of secondary, but is the source of value that will keep people wanting the community to exist.
Agreed and thank you. Without sounding like the forgotten bird who sang all summer, it's nice to see it recognised that OpenStack is not just built on code, but it's supporting foundations such as documentation.
But most importantly, that what we're trying to keep alive is actually the community and style of collaboration. Being a boomerang Stacker, I can't even tell you how much I appreciate coming back to a community who is so welcoming, and interested in working on cool new projects.
The thing people who are active in the community and want be "leaders" should be doing is focusing on ensuring that we create and maintain the systems that allow people to contribute in a way that sustains the style of collaboration, respects their persons and their labor, and (critically, an area where I think we are doing far too little) makes sure that the people who profit off that labor attend to their responsibilities.
I don't think I can add anything more to this than a +2. I can't agree enough and I hope to continue to foster and encourage this behaviour on or off the TC.
We have to, however, make sure that the source of value is good. Different people are interested in or have aptitudes for different things (e.g., writing code or writing about what code does); enabling those people to contribute to the best of their abilities and in an equitable fashion makes the community and the product better.
Thanks for responding Chris, I appreciate you taking the time to break this down.