Open Stack

As I've mentioned in past meetings, the Manila community needs to decide 
whether the OpenStack PTG is a venue we want to take advantage of in the 
future. In particular, there's a deadline to declare our plans for the 
Denver PTG in September by the end of the week.

Personally I'm conflicted because there are pros and cons either way, 
but having attended the Summit in Boston last week, I think I have all 
the information needed to form my own opinion and I'd really like to 
hear from the rest of you at the weekly meeting tomorrow.

I believe our choice breaks down into 2 broad categories:

1) Continue to be involved with PTG. In this case we would need to lobby 
the foundation organizers to reduce the kinds of scheduling conflicts 
that made the Atlanta PTG so problematic for our team.

2) Drop out of PTG and plan a virtual PTG just for Manila a few weeks 
before or after the official PTG. In this case we would encourage team 
members to get together at the summits for face to face discussions.


Pros for (1):
* This is clearly what the foundation wants
* For US-based developers it would save money compared to (2)
* It ensures that timezone issues don't prevent participation in discussions

Cons for (1):
* We'd have to fight with cross project sessions and other project 
sessions (notably Cinder) for time slots to meet. Very likely it will be 
impossible to participate in all 3 tracks, which some of us currently 
try to do.
* Some developers won't get budget for travel because it's not the kind 
of conference where there are customers and salespeople (and thus lots 
of spare money).

Pros for (2):
* Virtual meetups have worked out well for us in the past, and they save 
money.
* It allows us to easily avoid any scheduling conflicts with other tracks.
* It avoids exhaustion at the PTG itself where trying to participate in 
3 tracks would probably mean no downtime.
* It's pretty easy to get budget to travel to summits because there are 
customers and salespeople, so face to face time could be preserved by 
hanging out in hacking rooms and using forum sessions.

Cons for (2):
* Virtual meetups always cause problems for about 1/3 of the world's 
timezones. In the past this has meant west coast USA, and Asia/Pacific 
have been greatly inconvenienced because most participants where east 
coast USA and Europe based.
* Less chance for cross pollination to occur at PTG where people from 
other projects drop in.


Based on the pros/cons I personally lean towards (2), but I look forward 
to hearing from the community.

There is one more complication affecting this decision, which is that 
the very next summit is planned for Sydney, which is uniquely far away 
and expensive to travel to (for most of the core team). For that summit 
only, I expect the argument that it's easier to travel to summits than 
PTGs to be less true, because Sydney might be simply too expensive or 
time consuming for some of us. In the long run though I expect Sydney to 
be an outlier and most summits will be relatively cheap/easy to travel to.

-Ben Swartzlander