[openstack-dev] [nova][core] Expectations of core reviewers

Dan Smith dms at danplanet.com
Wed Aug 13 17:09:35 UTC 2014


> I'm not questioning the value of f2f - I'm questioning the idea of
> doing f2f meetings sooo many times a year. OpenStack is very much
> the outlier here among open source projects - the vast majority of
> projects get along very well with much less f2f time and a far
> smaller % of their contributors attend those f2f meetings that do
> happen. So I really do question what is missing from OpenStack's
> community interaction that makes us believe that having 4 f2f
> meetings a year is critical to our success.

How many is too many? So far, I have found the midcycles to be extremely
productive -- productive in a way that we don't see at the summits, and
I think other attendees agree. Obviously if budgets start limiting them,
then we'll have to deal with it, but I don't want to stop meeting
preemptively. IMHO, the reasons to cut back would be:

- People leaving with a "well, that was useless..." feeling
- Not enough people able to travel to make it worthwhile

So far, neither of those have been outcomes of the midcycles we've had,
so I think we're doing okay.

The design summits are structured differently, where we see a lot more
diverse attendance because of the colocation with the user summit. It
doesn't lend itself well to long and in-depth discussions about specific
things, but it's very useful for what it gives us in the way of
exposure. We could try to have less of that at the summit and more
midcycle-ish time, but I think it's unlikely to achieve the same level
of usefulness in that environment.

Specifically, the lack of colocation with too many other projects has
been a benefit. This time, Mark and Maru where there from Neutron. Last
time, Mark from Neutron and the other Mark from Glance were there. If
they were having meetups in other rooms (like at summit) they wouldn't
have been there exposed to discussions that didn't seem like they'd have
a component for their participation, but did after all (re: nova and
glance and who should own flavors).

> As pointed out this benefit for core devs has a direct negative
> impact on other non-core devs. I'm questioning whether this is
> really a net win overall vs other approaches to collaboration.

It's a net win, IMHO.

> As I explain in the rest of my email below I'm not advocating
> getting rid of mid-cycle events entirely. I'm suggesting that
> we can attain a reasonable % of the benefits of f2f meetings
> by doing more formal virtual meetups and so be more efficient
> and inclusive overall.

I'd love to see more high-bandwidth mechanisms used to have discussions
in between f2f meetings. In fact, one of the outcomes of this last
midcycle was that we should have one about APIv3 with the folks that
couldn't attend for other reasons. It came up specifically because we
made more progress in ninety minutes than we had in the previous eight
months (yes, even with a design summit in the middle of that).

Expecting cores to be at these sorts of things seems pretty reasonable
to me, given the usefulness (and gravity) of the discussions we've been
having so far. Companies with more cores will have to send more or make
some hard decisions, but I don't want to cut back on the meetings until
their value becomes unjustified.

--Dan

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