Open Stack

Thanks Joe for bringing this up. I have always tried to find topics
worth being covered in the weekly newsletter. I assemble that newsletter
thinking of developers and operators as the main targets, I'd like both
audiences to have one place to look at weekly and skim rapidly to see if
they missed something interesting.

Over the years I have tried to change it based on feedback I received so
this conversation is great to have

On 05/04/2015 12:03 PM, Joe Gordon wrote:
> 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?

These are all important and interesting questions. When there were fewer
projects it wasn't too hard to keep things together. Nowadays there is a
lot more going on and in gerrit, which requires a bit more upfront
investment to be useful.

> 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

I counted over 80 meetings each week: if they all took excellent notes,
with clear #info lines for the relevant stuff, one person would be able
probably to parse them all in a couple hours every week to identify
items worth reporting.

My experience is that IRC meeting logs don't convey anything useful to
outsiders. Pick any project log from
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/ and you'll see what I mean.
Even the best ones don't really mean much to those not into the project
itself.

I am very skeptical that we can educate all meeting participants to take
notes that can be meaningful to outsiders. I am also not sure that the
IRC meeting notes are the right place for this.

Maybe it would make more sense to educate PTLs and liasons to nudge me
with a brief email or log in some sort of notification bucket a quick
snippet of text to share with the rest of the contributors.

> * approved specs

More than the approved ones, which are easy to spot on
specs.openstack.org, I think the new ones proposed are more interesting.

Ideally I would find a way to publish draft specs on
specs.openstack.org/drafts/ or somehow provide a way for uneducated (to
gerrit) readers to more easily discover what's coming.

Until a better technical solution exists, I can pull regularly from all
status:open changesets from *-specs repositories and put them in a
section of the weekly newsletter.

> * periodically talk to the PTL of each project to see if any big
> discussions were discussed else where

I think this already happen in the xproject meeting, doesn't it?

> * Topics selected for discussion at summits

I'm confused about this: aren't these visible already as part of the
schedule?

> 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

Great to have precise examples to work with. It's useful exercise to
start from the end and trace back to where the answer will be. How would
the answer to these question look like?

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

I think it would help, it is feasible. Let's keep the ideas rolling :)

/stef