Open Stack

On Tue, 31 Mar 2015, Anita Kuno wrote:

> I am really having a problem with a lack of common vision. Now this may
> just be my problem here, and if it is, that is fine, I'll own that.

It's not just you.

> But other folks, as Dean mentions above, do indicate in their language
> that they feel something was present at one point and is either gone now
> or is in danger of going.

I haven't got enough history to know if it was once around and is
now gone, but I get powerful sense that it is not here now.

In part I think this, like so many other things, is an issue of scale
and growth: Things get fuzzy as they expand and diffuse so it is
inevitable.

But I also think that part of it is about identity. People often ask
me what OpenStack _is_ and I really struggle to give a concise
answer. There are a lot of economic factors driving that lack of
identity: Many parties want to be under the OpenStack umbrella
because being there has cachet and other value.

It's a tricky business because at many levels, including:

* project inclusion under the big tent
* contributions (of all types) from everyone (people who are 100% of
   time dedicated to projects to casual passers by)
* properly acknowledging the value of contributions of different
   types

we want to be inclusive (and non-aristocratic) yet by being
inclusive we cause the diffusion that we then need to counteract in
some way to manage "the culture".

> This doesn't really answer your question about what to name things, but
> I think the question is missing the forest for the trees.

It's common in large groups that are trying to collaborate to see them
reach a point where they say "oops, we're not working as well as we want
to, important things are being dropped" and then to discover that one of
the primary drivers for that lack of effectiveness is because people
aren't actually working towards the same goal and a reason they aren't
is because they've been using similar words to talk about issues, but
meaning entirely different things. You gotta have shared language and
shared understanding before you can go on to create the shared goals
which are required to really be collaborating.

In the compressed and rushed environment that we're working in it is
easy to skip the part where we establish the shared language. It
seems that underlying Joe posting this thread is an invitation to
do the hard word of finding and formalizing some language so that we
can use that to set some goals that we all share.

-- 
Chris Dent tw:@anticdent freenode:cdent
https://tank.peermore.com/tanks/cdent