Open Stack

On Tue, 13 Jan 2015, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:

> Yep, there have been a number of occassions when conversations that are
> relevant to my work have taken place on IRC channels for projects that
> I don't normally participate in. It would have been useful to be able
> to see the logs and in some cases the channels were not logged. I think
> that the project should log all #openstack* IRC channels unconditionally
> to maximise the spread of knowledge and improve/facilitate collaboration
> & communication between teams. We are a supposedly open, collaborative
> project after all.

I have no objection to the channels being logged but I think we need
to be careful about relying on the channels and the logs too much
for whatever is deemed as "important" conversation.

I think any medium which is driven by synchronous conversation is
fairly detrimental to fully participatory and _reasoned_ discussion
amongst people who are distributed around the world.

Yes, it's true that having the logs works to ameliorate many of the
problems presented by synchrony but it does little to address two
fairly large problems:

* it's so freaking noisy and interruption causing (even if you try
   to be good about ignoring it)
* decisions get made by the people are who are present _now_ and no
   others

(The second is obviously a more relevant problem.)

So: Yes please to logs, but no thank you to IRC being such a primary
medium of communication (which, in my experience, it has been in
OpenStack).

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