Open Stack

On Thu, 21 Feb 2019, Alexandra Settle wrote:

> Well hello again!

Hello!

> While you address this question to developers and recognise that
> there are many different types of contributors, I think
> documentation sits in a weird loop hole here. We are often
> considered developers because we follow developmental workflows,
> and integrate with the projects directly. Some of us are more
> technical than others and contribute to both the code base and to
> the physical documentation. Risking a straw man here: How would
> you define the technical writers that work for OpenStack? We too
> are often considered "OpenStack" writers and experts, yet as I
> say, we are not experts on every project.

I'd hesitate to define anyone. Technical writers, developers, users,
deployers and all the other terms we can come up with for people who
are involved in the OpenStack community are all individuals and do
things that overlap in many roles.

I was reluctant to use the term developer in my original question
because it's not a term I like because it is so frequently used to
designate a priesthood which has special powers (and rewards and
obligations) different from a (lesser) laity. Which is crap. Not as
crap as "software engineer" but still crap.

But I used it to try to forestall any "who do you mean" and "who does
the TC represent" questions, which, upon reflection, might have
been good questions to debate.

Technical writers, and developers, and everyone else who is involved
in the OpenStack community are co-authors of this thing which we
call OpenStack. From my standpoint the thing we are authoring, and
hope to keep alive, is the community and the style of collaboration
we use in it. The thing that people run clouds with and companies
sell is sort of secondary, but is the source of value that will keep
people wanting the community to exist.

The thing people who are active in the community and want be
"leaders" should be doing is focusing on ensuring that we create and
maintain the systems that allow people to contribute in a way that
sustains the style of collaboration, respects their persons and
their labor, and (critically, an area where I think we are doing far
too little) makes sure that the people who profit off that labor
attend to their responsibilities.

We have to, however, make sure that the source of value is good.
Different people are interested in or have aptitudes for different
things (e.g., writing code or writing about what code does);
enabling those people to contribute to the best of their abilities
and in an equitable fashion makes the community and the product
better.

-- 
Chris Dent                       ٩◔̯◔۶           https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent