Open Stack

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015, at 09:14 AM, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for stepping in, Stef.

I want to also back what Sean said elsewhere in the thread, though. This
appears to be a serious breach of the openness policies of the project.
I hope the team in question resolves the situation themselves, and
quickly.

Doug

> 
> 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
> 
> 
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