Open Stack

Before going any further, I am proposing something to make it easier for
the developer community to keep track of what other projects are working
on. I am not proposing anything to directly help operators or users, that
is a separate problem space.



In Mark McClain's TC candidacy email he brought up the issue of cross
project communication[0]:

  Our codebase has grown significantly over the years and a
contributor must invest significant time to understand and follow
every project; however many contributors have limited time must choose
a subset of projects to direct their focus.  As a result, it becomes
important to employ cross project communication to explain major
technical decisions, share solutions to project challenges that might
be widely applicable, and leverage our collective experience.  The TC
should seek new ways to facilitate cross project communication that
will enable the community to craft improvements to the interfaces
between projects as there will be greater familiarity between across
the boundary.
>
> Better cross project communication will make it easier to share technical
solutions and promote a more unified experience across projects.  It seems
like just about every time I talk to people from different projects I learn
about something interesting and relevant that they are working on.

While I usually track discussions on the mailing list, it is a poor way of
keeping track of what the big issues each project is working on. Stefano's
'OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter' does a good job of highlighting
many things including important mailing list conversations, but it doesn't
really answer the question of What is X (Ironic, Nova, Neutron, Cinder,
Keystone, Heat etc.) up to?

To tackle this I would like to propose the idea of a periodic developer
oriented newsletter, and if we agree to go forward with this, hopefully the
foundation can help us find someone to write newsletter.

Now on to the details.

I am not sure what the right cadence for this newsletter would be, but I
think weekly is too
frequent and once a 6 month cycle would be too infrequent.

The  big questions I would like to see answered are:

* What are the big challenges each project is currently working on?
* What can we learn from each other?
* Where are individual projects trying to solve the same problem
independently?

To answer these questions one needs to look at a lot of sources, including:

* Weekly meeting logs, or hopefully just the notes assuming we get better
at taking detailed notes
* approved specs
* periodically talk to the PTL of each project to see if any big
discussions were discussed else where
* Topics selected for discussion at summits

Off the top of my head here are a few topics that would make good
candidates for this newsletter:

* What are different projects doing with microversioned APIs, I know that
at least two projects are tackling this
* How has the specs process evolved in each project, we all started out
from a common point but seem to have all gone in slightly different
directions
* What will each projects priorities be in Liberty? Do any of them overlap?
* Any process changes that projects have tried that worked or didn't work
* How is functional testing evolving in each project


Would this help with cross project communication? Is this feasible? Other
thoughts?

best,
Joe




[0]
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-April/062361.html
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