Open Stack

On 02/11/2015 04:55 AM, Flavio Percoco wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
> During the last two cycles, I've had the feeling that some of the
> things I love the most about this community are degrading and moving
> to a state that I personally disagree with. With the hope of seeing
> these things improve, I'm taking the time today to share one of my
> concerns.
> 
> Since I believe we all work with good faith and we *all* should assume
> such when it comes to things happening in our community, I won't make
> names and I won't point fingers - yes, I don't have enough fingers to
> point based on the info I have. People that fall into the groups I'll
> mention below know that I'm talking to them.
> 
> This email is dedicated to the openness of our community/project.
> 
> ## Keep discussions open
> 
> I don't believe there's anything wrong about kicking off some
> discussions in private channels about specs/bugs. I don't believe
> there's anything wrong in having calls to speed up some discussions.
> HOWEVER, I believe it's *completely* wrong to consider those private
> discussions sufficient. If you have had that kind of private
> discussions, if you've discussed a spec privately and right after you
> went upstream and said: "This has been discussed in a call and it's
> good to go", I beg you to stop for 2 seconds and reconsider that. I
> don't believe you were able to fit all the community in that call and
> that you had enough consensus.
> 
> Furthermore, you should consider that having private conversations, at
> the very end, doesn't help with speeding up discussions. We've a
> community of people who *care* about the project they're working on.
> This means that whenever they see something that doesn't make much
> sense, they'll chime in and ask for clarification. If there was a
> private discussion on that topic, you'll have to provide the details
> of such discussion and bring that person up to date, which means the
> discussion will basically start again... from scratch.
> 
> ## Mailing List vs IRC Channel
> 
> I get it, our mailing list is freaking busy, keeping up with it is
> hard and time consuming and that leads to lots of IRC discussions. I
> don't think there's anything wrong with that but I believe it's wrong
> to expect *EVERYONE* to be in the IRC channel when those discussions
> happen.
> 
> If you are discussing something on IRC that requires the attention of
> most of your project's community, I highly recommend you to use the
> mailing list as oppose to pinging everyone independently and fighting
> with time zones. Using IRC bouncers as a replacement for something
> that should go to the mailing list is absurd. Please, use the mailing
> list and don't be afraid of having a bigger community chiming in in
> your discussion.  *THAT'S A GOOD THING*
> 
> Changes, specs, APIs, etc. Everything is good for the mailing list.
> We've fought hard to make this community grow, why shouldn't we take
> advantage of it?
> 
> ## Cores are *NOT* special
> 
> At some point, for some reason that is unknown to me, this message
> changed and the feeling of core's being some kind of superheros became
> a thing. It's gotten far enough to the point that I've came to know
> that some projects even have private (flagged with +s), password
> protected, irc channels for core reviewers.
> 
> This is the point where my good faith assumption skill falls short.
> Seriously, don't get me wrong but: WHAT IN THE ACTUAL F**K?
> 
> THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING PRIVATE FOR CORE ****REVIEWERS***** TO
> DISCUSS.

I'm kind of floored to find out that password protected irc channels
exist. That actually violates our base tenants of being an OpenStack
project, so is grounds for removing the project from OpenStack.

> If anything core reviewers should be the ones *FORCING* - it seems
> that *encouraging* doesn't have the same effect anymore - *OPENNESS* in
> order to include other non-core members in those discussions.
> 
> Remember that the "core" flag is granted because of the reviews that
> person has provided and because that individual *WANTS* to be part of
> it. It's not a prize for people. In fact, I consider core reviewers to
> be volunteers and their job is infinitely thanked.
> 
> Since, "All generalizations are false, including this one. - Mark
> Twain", I'm pretty sure there are folks that disagree with the above.
> If you do, I care about your thoughts. This is worth discussing and
> fighting for.
> 
> All the above being said, I'd like to thank everyone who fights for
> the openness of our community and encourage everyone to make that a
> must have thing in each sub-community. You don't need to be
> core-reviewer or PTL to do so. Speak up and help keeping the community
> as open as possible.
> 
> Cheers,
> Flavio
> 
> 
> 
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> 


-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net

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