Open Stack

On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 1:45 PM, Flavio Percoco <flavio at redhat.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Some of you, TC candidates, expressed concerns about diversity and
> inclusiveness
> (or inclusivity, depending on your taste) in your candidacy. I believe this
> is a
> broad, and some times ill-used, topic so, I'd like to know, from y'all, how
> you
> think we could make our community more inclusive. What areas would you
> improve
> first?
>
> Thank you,
> Flavio
>
> --
> @flaper87
> Flavio Percoco
>
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First of all, I'm not running for the position, so if this is
inappropriate clutter by your view, skip and move on. I just think
this is big enough topic to chip into the conversation and if doing so
I get some of the current and/or future
community/tc/<insert-your-group-here> member thinking, I've more than
succeeded.

We've been talking about how we need to be more welcoming, inclusive,
diverse and many more terms for achieving the same goal. And me if
anyone as a one of the cores for top help wanted list project should
be there in the front line yelling that we need more hands on the
deck. Yet still I think we're trying to solve wrong problem by saying
that we need to make OpenStack as welcoming as possible for everyone.

There has been raised few issues we can all more or less stand behind,
like Doug mentioning the -1s for typos, variable name disagreements
etc. I totally disagree with his solution. We have brilliant mechanism
to tackle that already, even the gerrit web ui provides one edit
directly on the review, but it's culturally "not ok to touch someone
else's patch (as this is individual contribution, not teamwork)". We
need cultural attitude change to fix many of these issues as it's not
the best usage of our gating nor reviewing resources to have yet
another patch there in the queue to fix that typo. We likely still can
all agree that the problem exists and is super annoying for everyone,
but it's just one small thing.

Taking that further we need to stop telling new contributors to find a
typo and fix it as their first commit. We (Glance team) have even set
disallowed change as part of our contribution guide for non-user
facing typo fixes as they really don't benefit anyone but makes more
work trying to keep the review queues in check and if one needs to
figure out when (and why) some change was made, that clutter is not
helpful in something like `git blame` either. That first commit is big
thing, no doubt, and it's even bigger and more hooking thing when you
actually do something meaningful with it! I still remember my fist
commit as it was just after feature freeze, agreed as exception
because it was part of making actually possible to run Images API v2.
If that patch was comment typo fix, I probably couldn't be proudly
telling about it now years later. That single word typo fix drowns so
easily into the queue and the person proposing it has likely moved on
week ago before the review is first time even eyeballed. This is
likely one of the reasons to what Amrith said seeing, so many one
commit contributors. The statistics does not tell how long it took to
get that first commit merged (even if it was only one revision) and if
the person was any way involved anymore when it did.

Fei Long mentioned that he had work for long time to get there and it
wasn't easy. It wasn't easy for me either when I joined, but guess
what, we're both still here! And we're both still working hard to
adjust ourselves and the community to be able to work effectively
together, That happened because we were motivated to be part of the
community, not just because it was made easy for us to so.

That leads to my point here. We have amazing community, by no means
it's perfect, but nevertheless we totally suck marketing it. I know
people who likes to work with OpenStack as it's cool technology but
don't want to deal with the bollox and politics in the community. And
it's really not that bad, but when ever we talk about these things
(publicly) we send out the message that we totally suck and we're
super hostile to get anyone joining and that's most important thing we
need to work on, time after time, year after year. If I was looking
this as outsider now I likely wouldn't want to make the effort when
the community itself claims that it sucks and it can't change in past
(or future) year(s).

What we really need to focus on is to get people _wanting_ to join us.
There is next to nothing easy in OpenStack with all it's complexity
and that's perfectly fine. Easy is not fun, we all want to challenge
ourselves. And we have amazing community to support those who wants to
join and make the difference. That is the group we need to grow and
when we run out of scalability of helping the people who really wants
to make the effort, then we should focus streamlining that process.

I'm eager to say, we're wasting our time trying to make it super
welcoming and easy just to join for everyone as long as we do not have
the queue of people who really wants to make a difference. Think about
it, feel free to tell that I'm totally wrong and just being ass by
saying this, and when you do, please explain why you think so.

Best,
Erno jokke Kuvaja