[openstack-dev] Fwd: Denver Ops Meetup post-mortem

Jimmy McArthur jimmy at openstack.org
Thu Sep 20 02:04:45 UTC 2018


Thanks for the thorough write-up as well as the detailed feedback.  I'm 
including some of my notes from the Ops Meetup Feedback session just a 
bit below, as well as some comments inline.

One of the critical things that would help both the Ops and Dev 
community is to have a holistic sense of what the Ops Meetup goals are.

  * Were the goals well defined ahead of the event?
  * Were they achieved and/or how can the larger OpenStack community
    help them achieve them?

 From our discussion at the Feedback session, this isn't something that 
has been tracked in the past.  Having actionable, measurable goals 
coming out of the Ops Meetup could go a long way towards helping the 
projects realize them.  Per our discussion, being able to present this 
list to the User Committee would be a good step forward for each event.

I wasn't able to attend the entire time, but a couple of interesting notes:

  * The knowledge of deployment tools seemed pretty fragmented and it
    seemed like there was a desire for more clear and comprehensive
    documentation comparing the different deployment options, as well as
    documentation about how to get started with a POC.
  * Bare Metal in the Datacenter: It was clear that we need more Ironic
    101 content and education, including how to get started, system
    requirements, etc. We can dig up presentations from previous Summits
    and also talked to TheJulia about potentially hosting a community
    meeting or producing another video leading up to the Berlin Summit.
  * Here are the notes from the sessions in case anyone on the ops list
    is interested:
    https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ops-meetup-ptg-denver-2018

It looks like there were some action items documented at the bottom of 
this etherpad: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ops-denver-2018-further-work

Ops Meetup Feedback Takeways from Feedback Session not covered below 
(mostly from https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/uc-stein-ptg)
Chris Morgan wrote:

--SNIP --
> What went well
>
> - some of the sessions were great and a lot of progress was made
> - overall attendance in the ops room was good
We had to add 5 tables to accommodate the additional attendees. It was a 
great crowd!
> - more developers were able to join the discussions
Given that this is something that wouldn't happen at a normal Ops 
Meetup, is there a way that would meet the Ops Community needs that we 
could help facilitate this int he future?
> - facilities were generally fine
> - some operators leveraged being at PTG to have useful involvement in 
> other sessions/discussions such as Keystone, User Committee, 
> Self-Healing SIG, not to mention the usual "hallway conversations", 
> and similarly some project devs were able to bring pressing questions 
> directly to operators.
>
> What didn't go so well:
>
> - Merging into upgrade SIG didn't go particularly well
This is a tough one b/c of the fluidity of the PTG. Agreed that one can 
end up missing a good chunk of the discussion.  OTOH, the flexibility of 
hte event is what allows great discussions to take place.  In the 
future, I think better coordination w/ specific project teams + updating 
the PTGBot could help make sure the schedules are in synch.
> - fewer ops attended (in particular there were fewer from outside the US)
Do you have demographics on the Ops Meetup in Japan or NY?  Curious to 
know how those compare to what we saw in Denver.  If there is more 
promotion needed, or indeed these just end up being more 
continent/regionally focused?
> - Some of the proposed sessions were not well vetted
Are there any suggestions on how to improve this moving forward?  
Perhaps a CFP style submission process, with a small vetting group, 
could help this situation?  My understanding was the Tokyo event, 
co-located with OpenStack Days, didn't suffer this problem.
> - some ops who did attend stated the event identity was diluted, it 
> was less attractive
I'd love some more info on this. Please have these people reach out to 
let me know how we can fix this in the future.  Even if we decide not to 
hold another Ops Meetup at a PTG, this is relevant to how we run events.
> - we tried to adjust the day 2 schedule to include late submissions, 
> however it was probably too late in some cases
>
> I don't think it's so important to drill down into all the whys and 
> wherefores of how we fell down here except to say that the ops meetups 
> team is a small bunch of volunteers all with day jobs (presumably just 
> like everyone else on this mailing list). The usual, basically.
>
> Much more important : what will be done to improve things going forward:
>
> - The User Committee has offered to get involved with the technical 
> content. In particular to bring forward topics from other relevant 
> events into the ops meetup planning process, and then take output from 
> ops meetups forward to subsequent events. We (ops meetup team) have 
> welcomed this.
This is super critical IMO.  One of the things we discussed at the Ops 
Meetup Feedback session (co-located w/ the UC Meeting) was to provide 
actionable list of takeaways from the meetup as well as measurable list 
of how you'd like to see them fixed.  From the conversation, this isn't 
something that has occurred before at Ops Meetups, but I think this 
would be a huge step forward in working towards a solution to your problems.
>
> - The Ops Meetups Team will endeavor to start topic selection earlier 
> and have a more critical approach. Having a longer list of possible 
> sessions (when starting with material from earlier events) should make 
> it at least possible to devise a better agenda. Agenda quality drives 
> attendance to some extent and so can ensure a virtuous circle.
Agreed 100%.  For the Forum, we start about 2 months out.  I think it's 
worth looking at that process to see if anything can be gained there. 
I'm very happy to assist with advice on this one...
>
> - We need to work out whether we're doing fixed schedule events 
> (similar to previous mid-cycle Ops Meetups) or fully flexible 
> PTG-style events, but grafting one onto the other ad-hoc clearly is a 
> terrible idea. This needs more discussion.
+1
>
> - The Ops Meetups Team continues to explore strange new worlds, or at 
> least get in touch with more and more OpenStack operators to find out 
> what the meetups team and these events could do for them and hence 
> drive the process better. One specific work item here is to help the 
> (widely disparate) operator community with technical issues such as 
> getting setup with the openstack git/gerrit and IRC. The latter is the 
> preferred way for the community to meet, but is particularly difficult 
> now with the registered nickname requirement. We will add help 
> documentation on how to get over this hurdle.
The IRC issues haven't affected me, fortunately.

I’d love to hear from anyone who attended, so we can share the learnings 
and discuss next steps…whether that means investing in 
documentation/education, proposing Forum sessions for the Berlin Summit, 
etc.

Cheers,
Jimmy
>
> - YOUR SUGGESTION HERE
>
> Chris
>
> -- 
> Chris Morgan <mihalis68 at gmail.com <mailto:mihalis68 at gmail.com>>
>
>
> -- 
> Chris Morgan <mihalis68 at gmail.com <mailto:mihalis68 at gmail.com>>
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