Open Stack

On Aug 13, 2014, at 1:44 PM, Russell Bryant <rbryant at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 08/13/2014 01:09 PM, Dan Smith wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I disagree.  IMO, *expecting* people to travel, potentially across the
> globe, 4 times a year is an unreasonable expectation, and quite
> uncharacteristic of open source projects.  If we can't figure out a way
> to have the most important conversations in a way that is inclusive of
> everyone, we're failing with our processes.
> 
> By all means, if a subset wants to meet up and make progress on some
> things, I think that's fine.  I don't think anyone think it's not
> useful.  However, discussions need to be summarized and taken back to
> the list for discussion before decisions are made.  That's not the way
> things are trending here, and I think that's a problem.

Count me in on the “not requiring travel” team here.   I have multiple issues with travel, including that it is very stressful and tends to ruin my productivity for weeks leading up to it, and lots of us also have family responsibilities that are difficult and potentially expensive to arrange for an absense, such as child care.

It’s difficult to compare OpenStack to other open source projects, in that it is on such a more massive and high velocity scale than almost any others (perhaps the Linux kernel is similar).   It is certainly true that F2F meetings encourage better communications and sparking of new ideas and directions that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred, but then again I will also suggest that the difference in collaborative productivities for different individuals between F2F and remote probably varies highly based on the individual, including their social proclivities, specific projects and focus, and working styles.    In this sense I’m really voting for an “all of the above” approach, in that yes we should do what we can to facilitate travel, we should do what we can to facilitate remote meetings over conferences and I love the idea of telepresence meetups, and we should give room to those who are very productive remotely and have difficulties with regular travel.     The telepresence idea in particular opens the door to people meeting up in a semi-F2F style many more than four times per year, in fact.  I wouldn’t mind at all going to an office every Friday to have our oslo.db meeting over a nice telepresence system.