Open Stack

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 08:55:52AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-02-26 at 16:03 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 10:39:08AM -0500, Rich Bowen wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > On 02/22/2016 10:14 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> > > > Hi everyone,
> > > > 
> > > > TL;DR: Let's split the events, starting after Barcelona.
> > > > 
> > > > ....
> > > > 
> > > > Comments, thoughts ?
> > > 
> > > Thierry (and Jay, who wrote a similar note much earlier in 
> > > February, and Lauren, who added more clarity over on the marketing 
> > > list, and the many, many of you who have spoken up in this thread
> > > ...),
> > > 
> > > as a community guy, I have grave concerns about what the long-term
> > > effect of this move would be. I agree with your reasons, and the
> > > problems, but I worry that this is not the way to solve it.
> > > 
> > > Summit is one time when we have an opportunity to hold community up 
> > > to the folks that think only product - to show them how critical it 
> > > is that the people that are on this mailing list are doing the 
> > > awesome things that they're doing, in the upstream, in cooperation 
> > > and collaboration with their competitors.
> > > 
> > > I worry that splitting the two events would remove the community 
> > > aspect from the conference. The conference would become more 
> > > corporate, more product, and less project.
> > > 
> > > My initial response was "crap, now I have to go to four events 
> > > instead of two", but as I thought about it, it became clear that 
> > > that wouldn't happen. I, and everyone else, would end up picking 
> > > one event or the other, and the division between product and
> > > project would deepen.
> > > 
> > > Summit, for me specifically, has frequently been at least as much 
> > > about showing the community to the sales/marketing folks in my own
> > > company, as showing our wares to the customer.
> > 
> > I think what you describe is a prime reason for why separating the
> > events would be *beneficial* for the community contributors. The
> > conference has long ago become so corporate focused that its session
> > offers little to no value to me as a project contributor. What you
> > describe as a benefit of being able to put community people infront
> > of business people is in fact a significant negative for the design
> > summit productivity. It causes key community contributors to be 
> > pulled out of important design sessions to go talk to business 
> > people, making the design sessions significantly less productive.
> 
> It's Naïve to think that something is so sacrosanct that it will be
> protected come what may.  Everything eventually has to justify itself
> to the funders.  Providing quid pro quo to sales and marketing helps
> enormously with that justification and it can be managed so it's not a
> huge drain on productive time.  OpenStack may be the new shiny now, but
> one day it won't be and then you'll need the support of the people
> you're currently disdaining.
> 
> I've said this before in the abstract, but let me try to make it
> specific and personal: once the kernel was the new shiny and money was
> poured all over us; we were pure and banned management types from the
> kernel summit and other events, but that all changed when the dot com
> bust came.  You're from Red Hat, if you ask the old timers about the
> Ottawa Linux Symposium and allied Kernel Summit I believe they'll
> recall that in 2005(or 6) the Red Hat answer to a plea to fund travel
> was here's $25 a head, go and find a floor to crash on.  As the
> wrangler for the new Linux Plumbers Conference I had to come up with
> all sorts of convoluted schemes for getting Red Hat to fund developer
> travel most of which involved embarrassing Brian Stevens into approving
> it over the objections of his managers.  I don't want to go into detail
> about how Red Hat reached this situation; I just want to remind you
> that it happened before and it could happen again.

The proposal to split the design summit off actually aims to reduce
the travel cost burden. Currently we have a conference+design summit
at the wrong time, which is fairly unproductive due to people being
pulled out of the design summit for other tasks. So  we "fixed" that
by introducing mid-cycles to get real design work done. IOW contributors
end up with 4 events to travel to each year. With the proposed split
of the conference from te design summit, we have a chance of having a
productive design summit that can ultimately eliminate the need for
the mid-cycles, so we have a good chance of getting back to 2 events
to travel to each year for the majority of contributors, with the
obviously reduction in costs.

Regards,
Daniel
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