Open Stack

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 08:57:40AM +1000, Michael Still wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> One of the action items from the nova midcycle was that I was asked to
> make nova's expectations of core reviews more clear. This email is an
> attempt at that.
> 
> Nova expects a minimum level of sustained code reviews from cores. In
> the past this has been generally held to be in the order of two code
> reviews a day, which is a pretty low bar compared to the review
> workload of many cores. I feel that existing cores understand this
> requirement well, and I am mostly stating it here for completeness.
> 
> Additionally, there is increasing levels of concern that cores need to
> be on the same page about the criteria we hold code to, as well as the
> overall direction of nova. While the weekly meetings help here, it was
> agreed that summit attendance is really important to cores. Its the
> way we decide where we're going for the next cycle, as well as a
> chance to make sure that people are all pulling in the same direction
> and trust each other.
> 
> There is also a strong preference for midcycle meetup attendance,
> although I understand that can sometimes be hard to arrange. My stance
> is that I'd like core's to try to attend, but understand that
> sometimes people will miss one. In response to the increasing
> importance of midcycles over time, I commit to trying to get the dates
> for these events announced further in advance.

Personally I'm going to find it really hard to justify long distance
travel 4 times a year for OpenStack for personal / family reasons,
let alone company cost. I couldn't attend Icehouse mid-cycle because
I just had too much travel in a short time to be able to do another
week long trip away from family. I couldn't attend Juno mid-cycle
because it clashed we personal holiday. There are other opensource
related conferences that I also have to attend (LinuxCon, FOSDEM,
KVM Forum, etc), etc so doubling the expected number of openstack
conferences from 2 to 4 is really very undesirable from my POV.
I might be able to attend the occassional mid-cycle meetup if the
location was convenient, but in general I don't see myself being
able to attend them regularly.

I tend to view the fact that we're emphasising the need of in-person
meetups to be somewhat of an indication of failure of our community
operation. The majority of open source projects work very effectively
with far less face-to-face time. OpenStack is fortunate that companies
are currently willing to spend 6/7-figure sums flying 1000's of
developers around the world many times a year, but I don't see that
lasting forever so I'm concerned about baking the idea of f2f midcycle
meetups into our way of life even more strongly.

> Given that we consider these physical events so important, I'd like
> people to let me know if they have travel funding issues. I can then
> approach the Foundation about funding travel if that is required.

Travel funding is certainly an issue, but I'm not sure that Foundation
funding would be a solution, because the impact probably isn't directly
on the core devs. Speaking with my Red Hat on, if the midcycle meetup
is important enough, the core devs will likely get the funding to attend.
The fallout of this though is that every attendee at a mid-cycle summit
means fewer attendees at the next design summit. So the impact of having
more core devs at mid-cycle is that we'll get fewer non-core devs at
the design summit. This sucks big time for the non-core devs who want
to engage with our community.

Also having each team do a f2f mid-cycle meetup at a different location
makes it even harder for people who have a genuine desire / need to take
part in multiple teams. Going to multiple mid-cycle meetups is even more
difficult to justify so they're having to make difficult decisions about
which to go to :-(

I'm also not a fan of mid-cycle meetups because I feel it further
stratifies our contributors into two increasly distinct camps - core
vs non-core.

I can see that a big benefit of a mid-cycle meetup is to be a focal
point for collaboration, to forcably break contributors our of their
day-to-day work pattern to concentrate on discussing specific issues.
It also obviously solves the distinct timezone problem we have with
our dispersed contributor base. I think that we should be examining
what we can achieve with some kind of virtual online mid-cycle meetups
instead. Using technology like google hangouts or some similar live
collaboration technology, not merely an IRC discussion. Pick a 2-3
day period, schedule formal agendas / talking slots as you would with
a physical summit and so on. I feel this would be more inclusive to
our community as a whole, avoid excessive travel costs, so allowing
more of our community to attend the bigger design summits. It would
even open possibility of having multiple meetups during a cycle (eg
could arrange mini virtual events around each milestone if we wanted)

Regards,
Daniel
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