Open Stack

On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 10:06 AM, Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com> wrote:
> [This is meant to be one of (I hope) several conversation-provoking
> questions directed at prospective TC members to help the community
> understand their positions before considering how to vote in the
> ongoing election.]
>
> Over the last year we have seen some contraction in the number of
> companies and individuals contributing to OpenStack. At the same
> time we have started seeing contributions from other companies and
> individuals. To some degree this contraction and shift in contributor
> base is a natural outcome of changes in OpenStack itself along with
> the rest of the technology industry, but as with any change it
> raises questions about how and whether we can ensure a smooth
> transition to a new steady state.
>
> What aspects of our policies or culture make contributing to OpenStack
> more difficult than contributing to other open source projects?
>
> Which of those would you change, and how?
>
> Where else should we be looking for contributors?

I think that for the most part, the most vocal audience is the one
that contributes the most is
mostly very comfortable with the tools and processes that we have in
place today.  However,
I think we may have become 'blind' to the viewpoint of new
contributors and forgot some of
our habits might be very difficult pain points for other users.

## Communication

There is a significant amount of communication and work that happens
over IRC.  I'll admit,
it's one of my most preferable ways of communicating.  However, it's
not something that
is common for newer contributors to use.  Our developer manual lists
it before anything:

https://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/developers.html#irc-account

There are a few other communities which are growing quickly and
they're using alternative
ways of communication.  I personally prefer  IRC, but maybe we should
put our preferences
aside and look at what's sustainable, because we have to be
progressive and move quickly.

Perhaps we should look into a OpenStack Slack community in combination
with an IRC
bridge?

 ## Tooling

The majority of long time OpenStack contributors are very comfortable
with the Gerrit
workflow.  They're also very comfortable with rebasing patches,
pushing them, setting
up dependencies, etc.

The newer developer might have some Gerrit experience but more than
likely, they might
probably have more of a GitHub workflow experience and that's the
easiest way that
the can submit code.

While my own preference is to use Gerrit, I think that perhaps looking
into opening up a
way for contributions via GitHub to be available could be an
interesting option.  Now, the
technical side of me can imagine all the challenges, but again, we
must keep things easy
and approachable.

If submitting a patch to the OpenStack community involves setting up
an account in the
Canonical "Ubuntu One" OpenID, creating a username in Gerrit
afterwards, sign the CLA,
which could get complicated depending on your organization, upload
your keys, setup
git-review before being able to push up a single patch (and then
there's Launchpad for
bugs and some projects are on Storyboard, etc)

That's a lot of extra work that we're putting on new potential
contributors.  I don't mind it,
but I think we have to collectively think about new potential
contributors rather than
our preferences.

I'm giving a lot of ideas that I might not have technical solutions in
place, but I think putting
them out might bring up some other ways that we can come to a
compromise and make it work
to make contributing to OpenStack easy.

>
> Doug
>
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