Open Stack

confirmed

On 07/10/14 04:30 PM, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> I am announcing my candidacy for a position on the OpenStack Technical
> Committee.
> 
> I am currently employed by HP to work upstream on OpenStack. I started
> contributing in 2012, not long after joining DreamHost. I am one of
> the founding members of the Ceilometer project, and a core reviewer
> for the requirements and unified command line interface projects. I am
> also part of the team working on the Python 3 transition, and have
> contributed to several of the infrastructure projects. Kilo will be my
> third term serving as PTL for the Oslo project, and I have served on
> the Technical Committee for the last year. In addition to my technical
> contributions, I helped to found and still help to organize the
> OpenStack meetup group in Atlanta, Georgia.
> 
> I've included the answers to the formally posed election questions
> below, but please follow up here with any other questions you might
> have for me.
> 
> The OpenStack community is the most exciting and welcoming group I
> have interacted with in more than 20 years of contributing to open
> source projects. I'm looking forward to continuing to being a part
> of the community and serving the project.
> 
> Thank you,
> Doug
> 
> Review history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/reviewer:2472,n,z
> Commit history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/owner:2472,n,z
> Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=doug-hellmann
> Foundation: http://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/359
> OpenHUB: https://www.openhub.net/accounts/doughellmann
> Freenode: dhellmann
> Website: http://doughellmann.com
> 
> 
> 
> * Topic: OpenStack Mission
> *
> * How do you feel the technical community is doing in meeting the
> * OpenStack Mission?
> 
> I am amazed by what our community produces. We have some truly
> exceptional development teams building great software. We regularly
> add new components to the system, and our feature set is as diverse as
> the community. Our work is not perfect, but as we continue to refine
> it based on experience and input from users, we are continually
> improving the way we work and what we produce.
> 
> However, there are recurring themes in the user feedback after every
> release: We need to make OpenStack easier to operate, easier to use,
> and easier to debug. We are starting to build cross-project teams to
> work more directly on some of these areas, and it's important that we
> give priority to that work and consider usability and scalability as
> features.
> 
> * Topic: Technical Committee Mission
> *
> * How do you feel the technical committee is doing in meeting the
> * technical committee mission?
> 
> We're fulfilling most of the mission, but we can do better.
> 
> The Zaqar graduation discussion is a good example of an area where we
> need to rethink how we bring new project teams into OpenStack. There
> are several similar suggestions to drop our current incubation and
> integration process completely, and that is one option. Another is to
> set up the resources we would need to do an objective technical
> evaluation for projects. I favor a combination of those two ideas,
> evaluating projects on several criteria from the users' perspective,
> but deciding the "official" status of a team based on community
> considerations.
> 
> We have also recognized that we need some way to handle cross-project
> initiatives such as improving our logging to make debugging easier,
> but we do not yet have a formal structure in place to accomplish those
> goals. The way we set up working groups for those sorts of jobs is
> going to depend on the outcome of the bigger governance discussion,
> but I think they should be organized by the TC.
> 
> * Topic: Contributor Motivation
> *
> * How would you characterize the various facets of contributor
> * motivation?
> 
> I don't know if we have numbers, but my impression is that most of our
> contributions come from people employed at least in part to work on
> OpenStack. Their commitment to the project as a whole, outside of
> their area of specialty, varies for a lot of reasons. We want everyone
> to have a strong commitment to the whole project, but that's not
> always realistic, because it's not always up to the individual to
> decide how much time or effort they can put into working on OpenStack,
> or into a given area. That's perfectly normal and OK. We can, and do,
> welcome contributions from all sorts of people for all sorts of
> reasons.
> 
> * Topic: Rate of Growth
> *
> * There is no argument the OpenStack technical community has a
> * substantial rate of growth. What are some of the consequences of
> * this rate?
> 
> Growing so quickly is forcing us to think about how we organize our
> selves and make changes explicitly, and more rapidly, rather than
> allowing for a slower evolution.  We've had a lot of blog posts and
> mailing list threads talking about ways to handle the growth through
> governance model changes to the project. These are important decisions
> for us to make as a community, and we need to weigh both sides of each
> issue carefully.
> 
> For example, we want to be more inclusive and bring more project teams
> into OpenStack, but doing that further strains our cross-project
> teams' capacity to help us all with documentation, infrastructure, and
> release management. More creative independence for projects can
> increase complexity for deployers and users as we drift away from
> consistent patterns. Providing incentives for creating new projects
> may take away incentives for collaborating on existing projects,
> ultimately hurting both projects. In each of these cases we want some
> aspects of both sides of the equation, but we need to strike a
> balance.
> 
> Working out the changes we need to our existing set of policies will
> take more thought and discussion [1], as we try to predict the
> consequences of the proposed changes and craft new policies that are
> flexible enough to continue to maintain a healthy community.
> 
> [1] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+project:openstack/governance+topic:big-tent,n,z
> 
> * Topic: New Contributor Experience
> *
> * How would you characterize the experience new contributors have
> * currently?
> 
> There's no question that OpenStack has a steep learning curve, both as
> a user and a contributor.
> 
> Documentation is useful as a reference, but there's nothing quite like
> having an experienced guide helping you first hand.  I had the benefit
> of a couple of informal mentors when I started contributing. They
> walked me through the long process of setting up the tools and
> development environment I needed until I was able to submit my first
> patch, helped me get the most out of the design summit, and generally
> eased my entrance into the community. Today we have a few formal
> programs in the community to match mentors and new community
> members. Those programs deserve our support, but day to day, we can
> all do a little bit to help each other out by answering questions and
> sharing our knowledge freely.
> 
> * Topic: Communication
> *
> * How would you describe our current state of communication in the
> * OpenStack community?
> 
> Our growth is making communication more challenging, but we are
> adapting.
> 
> The specs process has helped with technical planning, setting
> expectations, and recording decisions. Still, we have a lot of
> initiatives not tied directly to specs -- especially those that span
> project boundaries and releases.
> 
> I told the Oslo team that my mantra for this cycle is "Write it down,"
> by which I mean we should clearly document our discussions and
> decisions so when a topic comes up again we do not have to rely on our
> memory. IRC is a great medium for quick iteration, but it's lousy as a
> historical record.
> 
> Communication is the key to maintaining a healthy open source
> community. Keeping up can be difficult, but we all have to pay
> attention to the messages coming out of other teams, to watch for
> anything relevant, then participate in the conversation.
> 
> * Topic: Relationship with the Foundation Board
> *
> * The technical committee interacts with the foundation board on several
> * different fronts. How would you describe these interactions?
> 
> I have a somewhat better impression of the relationship between the TC
> and Board than has been expressed by other candidates.  We are
> different groups, with different perspectives, but we are all working
> in what we consider to be the best interests of the OpenStack project
> and that means working together. The face-to-face meeting in Atlanta
> allowed some of that attitude to show through in ways that it doesn't
> always in IRC or phone meetings.  We have had spirited debates on
> topics like DefCore and the CLA, as is natural for groups with such
> different perspectives, but we are also continuing to work together to
> find ways to solve those and other issues.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> OpenStack-dev mailing list
> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
> 
> 


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