Open Stack

On 02/29/2016 05:34 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
> 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.

I would hardly expect you to take responsibility for someone else's
behaviour. It feels odd to me that you would try.

> 
>> 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 didn't offer it. And personally I do want people to submit patches. It
is their motivation for doing so that I am drawing attention to.

> 
>> 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.

I think you are missing the point of my explanation to the question I
was asked.

I am interested in mutually beneficial interactions.

I am not interested in unbalanced or one sided interactions.

Sorry I was unclear earlier.

Thanks,
Anita.

> 
> James
>