Open Stack

> On Dec 13, 2016, at 19:43, Ed Leafe <ed at leafe.com> wrote:
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> On Dec 12, 2016, at 10:30 PM, Steven Dake (stdake) <stdake at cisco.com> wrote:
> 
>> The issue raised is they violate the 4 opens.
> 
> Not necessarily. If you have regular planning meetings and discussions in an open manner as prescribed, an occasional conference to discuss a particular matter is not a "violation". What if someone in your office is working on OpenStack too, and you meet in the hallway and discuss something technical? Does that violate the 4 Opens?
> 
> I think we have to balance realism with idealism.

It wouldn’t be the first time video chats were shot down. As I recall, one of the conditions for the OpenStack Chef cookbooks to become an official OpenStack project was that we gave up our weekly Hangouts meetings in favor of weekly IRC meetings. As it was, when the cookbooks were still considered StackForge, links were sent out to the mailing list and channel prior to the meeting starting, to give people a time to get coffee, comb their hair and put on a shirt (pants optional).

Today, we do not hold weekly meetings as the cores are either west coast US or Europe, so pretty much every time is bad, as we have minimal overlap. It used to be pretty easy to point at a video call and say “I’m doing that right there”. Not so much to get an hour dedicated to IRC, because of the very nature of IRC, so we lost folks to the winds of change. At some point in the Newton cycle, we did not see much value in holding weekly IRC meetings, as we were just echoing what we said in our dedicated channel, so we gave up our scheduled slot. From the founding team, only two members remain.To date, one core has joined, bringing us up to three, down from eight, spread across two continents. The picture I paint is not good eats.

As PTL and direct consumer of the output of the cookbooks, I feel that eliminating the option to hold our meetings via video chat was a detrimental blow to the project's trajectory, as a result of becoming an OpenStack project. Given the cookbooks’ complexity and the ability to get shit done that came from having that virtual face-to-face time, it made sense to sit down and “uhm" and “hrm" about things with a like-minded individual, obligatory link in the channel for those playing along on IRC.

Since giving up Hangouts, we have had minimal auditory/visual interaction in the effort of “transparency” and being “open” on IRC. I recall that we had exactly one video chat since becoming an official project, and it was immensely useful for the few minutes we talked, and got more across than a day’s worth of IRC meetings.  Beyond that, our face time has involved meeting up at a given Summit that we all happen to attend, which is entirely too long to go between seeing teammates IMHO. The PTG isn’t of much benefit to the cookbooks, either, as it’s a non-trivial distance and expense for all of the cores for not much gain, when one of us can just shift hours for a video call.

-sc

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> -- Ed Leafe
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