Open Stack

This is a really nice idea. I feel the same, that we can offload some of the work from the liaisons and reduce the number of syncs that need to happen. This can be a good source of asynchronous communication however, I still feel that we need to keep a good balance of both.  Also, I like the proposed scope of the newsletter.

Thanks,
 -Nikhil
    

From: Joe Gordon <joe.gordon0 at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 4, 2015 3:03 PM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List
Subject: [openstack-dev] [all] cross project communication: periodic developer newsletter?
  


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