Open Stack

On Sat, May 14 2016, Nikhil Komawar wrote:

> I think people prefer to use ML a lot and I am not a great fan of the
> same. It is a multi-cast way of communication and it has assumptions
> around time, space, intent of the audience & intent to actually read
> them. Same is for gerrit/etherpad.

It's asynchronous, that's why people tend to prefer it. You can deal
with it when it's the most appropriate for you.


[…]

> Another step is to arrange/show-up in meetings, yes this is tedious but
> extremely vital. This is the place where you can actually determine if
> the convergence factor is more or less. I find that a lot of people take
> meetings lightly and their approach isn't establishing a deterministic
> behavior in the team. Many times, it becomes a disruptive behavior and
> the convergence decreases significantly.

OTOH meetings are terrible as they put a lot of constraints on people
that want to participate but are unable to. Not good for an open
community.

However, that has the upside of forcing people to make sacrifices if
they *really* want to participate in a conversation, whereas, as you
stated, anyone can jump in a mailing-list thread and start bike-shed,
even if they don't really care.

My experience is that it's still better to handle mailing list, and to
only deal with people you know might be interested in really helping,
and ignore the rest.

> Though, I think every team needs to be synchronous about their approach
> and not use delayed mechanisms like ML or gerrit.

That's rather the first symptoms of a dysfunctional team that is not
able to communicate properly. So you need to force people to be on the
same team so they *really* communicate without other choices.

> * Also, one very important thing that I keep hearing: "I do not like
> that" without any other information, as an argument to disregard
> technical proposals. I think it is very disruptive and irrational way to
> express arguments. We are not buying flowers in OpenStack, we need to
> keep rationality in check when we express our opinions. It reduces
> convergence factor and increases dubiety among the developers &
> reviewers. Then we have a ecosystem where people do not understand why
> we do things the way we do it. We should not stop businesses just
> because someone doesn't like something, please no. Lack of rationale can
> actually do that.

Agreed, I encounter(ed) a lot of those "don't like" comments. If it's
not from core reviewers, people should learn to ignore those -1, and if
it's core reviewers… you better fix the core reviewers. ;-)

My 2c,

Cheers,
-- 
Julien Danjou
// Free Software hacker
// https://julien.danjou.info
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