Open Stack

On Mon, 2016-02-29 at 15:57 -0500, Anita Kuno wrote:
> On 02/29/2016 03:10 PM, Eoghan Glynn wrote:
> > 
> > > > Current thinking would be to give preferential rates to access 
> > > > the main summit to people who are present to other events (like 
> > > > this new separated contributors-oriented event, or Ops 
> > > > midcycle(s)). That would allow for a wider definition of 
> > > > "active community member" and reduce gaming.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > I think reducing gaming is important. It is valuable to include 
> > > those folks who wish to make a contribution to OpenStack, I have
> > > confidence the next iteration of entry structure will try to more 
> > > accurately identify those folks who bring value to OpenStack.
> > 
> > There have been a couple references to "gaming" on this thread, 
> > which seem to imply a certain degree of dishonesty, in the sense of
> > bending the rules.
> > 
> > Can anyone who has used the phrase clarify:
> > 
> >  (a) what exactly they mean by gaming in this context
> > 
> > and:
> > 
> >  (b) why they think this is a clear & present problem demanding a
> >      solution?
> > 
> > For the record, landing a small number of patches per cycle and 
> > thus earning an ATC summit pass as a result is not, IMO at least,
> > gaming.
> > 
> > Instead, it's called *contributing*.
> > 
> > (on a small scale, but contributing none-the-less).
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Eoghan
> > 
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> 
> Sure I can tell you what I mean.
> 
> In Vancouver I happened to be sitting behind someone who stated "I'm
> just here for the buzz." Which is lovely for that person. The problem 
> is that the buzz that person is there for is partially created by me 
> and I create it and mean to offer it to people who will return it in 
> kind, not just soak it up and keep it to themselves.

Sorry about that; it does sound like a thing a sales or marketing
person would say.

> Now I have no way of knowing who this person is and how they arrived
> at the event. But the numbers for people offering one patch to
> OpenStack (the bar for a summit pass) is significantly higher than
> the curve of people offering two, three or four patches to OpenStack
> (patches that are accepted and merged). So some folks are doing the
> minimum to get a summit pass rather than being part of the cohort
> that has their first patch to OpenStack as a means of offering their
> second patch to OpenStack.

Which does sound like the ATC inducement is working.  If you don't want
it to encourage people to submit patches then it shouldn't be offered.

> I consider it an honour and a privilege that I get to work with so 
> many wonderful people everyday who are dedicated to making open 
> source clouds available for whoever would wish to have clouds. I'm 
> more than a little tired of having my energy drained by folks who 
> enjoy feeding off of it while making no effort to return beneficial
> energy in kind.
> 
> So when I use the phrase gaming, this is the dynamic to which I 
> refer.

While I accept there is potentially a gaming problem in all forms of
Open Source (we see this in the kernel with the attempt to boost patch
counts with trivial changes), I'd be hesitant to characterise people
who only submit a single patch as gamers because there's a lot of drive
by patching that goes on in the long tail of any project.  The usual
reason for this is everything works great apart from one thing, which
the person gets annoyed enough over to investigate and patch.  I've
done it myself in a lot of Open Source projects.  Once your patch is
in, you've no need to submit another because everything is now working
as you wished and your goal was to fix the problem not become further
involved in the development side of things.  I suspect if you look in
the long tail of OpenStack you'll find a lot of user and operator
patches for precisely this reason.

James