Open Stack

-----Original Message-----
From: James Bottomley [mailto:James.Bottomley at HansenPartnership.com] 
Sent: February-26-16 12:38 PM
To: Daniel P. Berrange
Cc: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [all] A proposal to separate the design summit

On Fri, 2016-02-26 at 17:24 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 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.

Cost isn't the problem; justification of the need in the first place is.  If you can't give a business need it doesn't matter how cheap you've made the trip, it still gets vetoed.  You've reduced the cost by not sending engineers to any of the events that sales and marketing go to.  When cost reduction meetings roll around, they're going to demand a halt to inessential travel, which means travel not supporting the revenue producing business units (sales and marketing).  Essentially your reduced cost becomes fully recoverable because you're not going to any event they see as important.

James

I agree. For developers, the justification of presenting on main summit + attending contributor event would be easier to get approval for one trip. If these two events are spitted, it would be harder for developers to attend any event. I want to point out the fact that some projects were holding online midcycle because their developers were not able to get approval for a pure contributor event.

Best regards,
Hongbin


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