Open Stack

On 02/11/2015 05:52 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 10:55:18AM +0100, 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.
> 
> With the timezones of our worldwide contributors it is pretty much
> guaranteed that any realtime phone call will have excluded a part
> of our community.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I can see that if people have reached an impass in discussions via
> email or irc, it is sometimes helpful to have a call to break a
> roadblock. I absolutely agree though that the results of any such
> calls should not be presented as a final decision. At the very least
> it is neccessary to describe the rationale for the POV obtained as
> a result of the call, and give the broader community the opportunity
> to put forward counterpoints if required. We should certainly not
> just say 'its good to go' and +A sommething based on a private call.
> 
>> ## 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.
> 
> Again, timezones. It is a physical impossibility for most people to
> be on IRC for more than 8 hours a day, so that's only 1/3 of the day
> that any signle person will likely be on IRC.  And no, expecting
> people to have a permanently connected IRC proxy and then read the
> other 16 hours of logs each morning is not a solution.
> 
> Personally I've stopped joining IRC most the time regardless, because
> I feel I am far more productive when I'm not being interrupted with
> IRC pings every 20 minutes. There should be few things so urgent that
> they can't be dealt with over email. Again because of our timezone
> differences we should be wary of making important decisions in a
> rush - anything remotely non-trivial should have at least a 24 hour
> window to allow people on all timezones a chance to see the point
> and join in discussion.

IRC is mostly not about discussions, it's about discussion, context,
team building, and trust. And it's a cross organization open forum for that.

If core team members start dropping off external IRC where they are
communicating across corporate boundaries, then the local tribal effects
start taking over. You get people start talking about the upstream as
"them". The moment we get into us vs. them, we've got a problem.
Especially when the upstream project is "them".

So while I agree, I'd personally get a ton more done if I didn't make
myself available to answer questions or help sort out misunderstandings
people were having with things I'm an expert in, doing so would
definitely detrimentally impact the project as a whole. So I find it an
unfortunate decision for a core team member.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net