Open Stack

On Wed, 2015-02-11 at 10:55 +0100, Flavio Percoco wrote:
> This email is dedicated to the openness of our community/project.

It's good to have a reminder every now and then. Thank you Flavio for
caring enough to notice bad patterns and for raising a flag. 

> ## 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. 
[...]

Well said. Conversations can happen anywhere and any time, but they
should stay in open and accessible channels. Consensus needs to be built
and decisions need to be shared, agreed upon by the community at large
(and mailing lists are the most accessible media we have). 

That said, it's is very hard to generalize and I'd rather deal/solve
specific examples. Sometimes, I'm sure there are episodes when a fast
decision was needed and a limited amount of people had to carry the
burden of responsibility. Life is hard, software development is hard and
general rules sometimes need to be adapted to the reality. Again, too
much generalization here for what I'm confortable with.

Maybe it's worth repeating that I'm personally (and in my role)
available to listen and mediate in cases when communication seems to
happen behind closed doors. If you think something unhealthy is
happening, talk to me (confidentiality assured).

> ## 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.

Not sure I agree with the causality but, the facts are those: traffic on
the list and on IRC is very high (although not increasing anymore
[1][2]).

>  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.

Email is hard, I have the feeling that the vast majority of people use
bad (they all suck, no joke) email clients. Lots and lots of email is
even worse. Most contributors commit very few patches: the investment
for them to configure their MUA to filter our traffic is too high.

I have added more topics today to the openstack-dev list[3]. Maybe,
besides filtering on the receiving end, we may spend some time
explaining how to use mailman topics? I'll draft something on Ask, it
may help those that have limited interest in OpenStack.

What else can we do to make things better?

> ## 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 seriously disturbing.

If you're one of those core reviewers hanging out on a private channel,
please contact me privately: I'd love to hear from you why we failed as
a community at convincing you that an open channel is the place to be.

No public shaming, please: education first.

Cheers,
stef


[1] http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/mls.html
[2] http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/irc.html
[3] thanks to Luigi Toscano for highlighting some missing ones