Open Stack

On 14/12/16 12:05 -0500, Doug Hellmann wrote:
>Excerpts from Michał Jastrzębski's message of 2016-12-14 09:56:46 -0600:
>> OK, I think we had some grave misunderstandings here.
>>
>> 1. ad-hoc meetings *are not* and *were never meant to be* replacement
>> for weekly meetings. Kolla community is single community across all
>> its deliverables and we hold common meetings, chats and mailing list.
>> Also, as long as I'm PTL, I'm unwilling to change that.
>> 2. Hangouts were never exclusive purposefully. Meeting link was always
>> posted on irc, and nobody were excluded apart from people not present
>> on irc at given time.
>> 3. Language barrier is something to acknowledge. I would say if we
>> find ourselves in situation where one of hangout users has problem
>> communicating, we either move to IRC or try hard to accommodate his or
>> hers language barrier. But on few hangouts I was on, that was not the
>> case. If somebody didn't join because they were ashamed, please, feel
>> free to approach me on private message (or if I'm not around, hangout
>> organizer) and let me know. That would be reason enough to stick to
>> IRC in my book
>> 4. Hangouts were never exclusive to core team. Just happened that core
>> reviewers were majority of it - not planned or enforced.
>> 5. Only "exclusiveness" I can think of in context of ad hoc meetings
>> are that people who aren't around irc cannot have voice on this
>> meeting. Simply because they aren't around and meeting was unplanned.
>> That's the case with *any* discussion outside of dedicated 1hr every
>> week. Granted, irc has logs. Hangouts can have notes, or outcome could
>> be reflected as PoC in gerrit for example (which was the case of
>> hangout in question..).
>
>As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the Google Hangout
>service itself is *blocked* in some countries. It is therefore by
>definition not something we can call a fully open meeting venue. Which
>is not to say it can never be used, but we all need to be aware of the
>fact that choosing it means we exclude participation from other team
>members (or potential team members).

+1

Besides Google Hangout being blocked in some countries, I'd also like to
highlight a couple of other issues with vide/voice meetings:

1) For *many* people in our community it's already *hard* enough to communicate
in written English. Requesting these members to join a video/voice meeting will
put them in a not-so-comfortable spot.

2) Many of our contributors live in countries where fast internet connection is,
unfortunately, not a reality. Having video/voice calls will likely prevent them
from joining as well.

3) Members of our community work in a variaty of different places (planes,
coffee shops, offices, homes, etc) and vide/voice meetings are difficult to join
in many of this places. For example, if you have a newborn, you probably don't
want to join a video/voice call to avoid making noise. If you work from a coffee
shop (or even an office), it'll be hard to join video/voice calls because of the
noise or who knows what else might be happening there. Let's not even talk about
planes ;)

4) Voice/video meetings are hard to log. This make it hard for folks in not
EU/US "friendly" timezones to keep up.

5) *Many* members of our community simply don't feel comfortable with
video/voice meetings, even native english speakers.

Some of these points have been mentioend already but given that I've a strong
opinion about this, I thought I'd mention them anyway. FWIW, sometimes waiting
for people to complain to change something is just the wrong strategy,
especially when it comes down to improving a community. If your community
depends on things that are unwelcome for some of its members, you must change
it. Some cultures don't believe in complaining and some others will just leave.
Either way, the project/community will pay the price.

I'd like to urge the kolla team to drop these video calls entirely and stick to
IRC which has been proven to be a good (not perfect) welcoming tool for the
OpenStack community.

Flavio

[snip]

-- 
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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