Open Stack

On 23/04/18 10:06, Doug Hellmann 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?

There's probably two separate groups we need to consider. The first is 
operators and users of OpenStack. We want those folks to contribute when 
they see a problem or an opportunity to improve, and their feedback is 
extremely valuable because they know the product best. We need to 
encourage new contributors in this group and retain existing ones by:

* Reducing barriers to contributing, like having to register for 
multiple services, sign a CLA &c. We're mostly aware of the problems in 
this area and have been making incremental progress on them over a long 
period of time.

* Encouraging people to get involved. Low-hanging-fruit bug lists are 
useful. Even something like a link on every docs page indicating where 
to edit the source would help encourage people to take that first step. 
(Technically we have this when you click the 'bug' link - but it's not 
obvious, and you need to sign up for a Launchpad account to use it... 
see above.) Once people have done the initial setup work for a first 
patch, they're more likely to contribute again. The First Contact SIG is 
doing great work in this area.

* The most important one: provide prompt, actionable feedback on 
changes. Nothing kills contributor motivation like having your changes 
ignored for months. Unfortunately this is also the hardest one to deal 
with; the situation is different in every project, and much depends on 
the amount of time available from the existing contributors. Adding more 
core reviewers helps; finding ways to limit the proportion of the code 
base that a core reviewer is responsible for (either by splitting up 
repos or giving cores a specific area of responsibility in a repo) would 
be one way to train them quicker.

Another way, which I already alluded to in my candidacy message, is to 
expand the pool of OpenStack users. One of my goals is to make OpenStack 
an attractive cloud platform to write applications against, and not 
merely somewhere to get a VM to run your application in. If we can 
achieve that we'll increase the market for OpenStack and hence the 
number of users and thus potential contributors. But those new users 
would be more motivated than anyone to find and fix bugs, and they're 
already developers so they'd be disproportionately more likely to 
contribute code in addition to documentation or bug reports (which are 
also important contributions).


The second group is those who are paid specifically to spend a portion 
of their time on upstream contribution, which brings us to...

> Where else should we be looking for contributors?

Companies who are making money from OpenStack! It's their responsibility 
to maintain the commons and, collectively speaking at least, their 
problem if they don't.

For a start, we need to convince anybody who is maintaining a fork of 
OpenStack to do something more useful with their money. Like, for 
example, building it into a big pile and setting fire to it to keep warm.

Maybe education is something that can help here. For a lot of folks, 
OpenStack is their first direct contact with an open source community. 
If we could help them to learn why contributing is in their best 
interest, and how to do it effectively, then we could make some 
progress. It's pretty remarkable that there are Foundation board members 
still asking the TC to direct employees of other companies to work on 
the stuff they want them to for free.

cheers,
Zane.