Open Stack

Hello Everyone,

We had many discussions on the help-most-needed list [1] & its future at Denver conference ( Joint leadership meeting, Forum and PTG).  This time we are able to get volunteers from the board of directors,  also new ideas to redefine the list and give another chance if we can get contributors to help from companies or universities. 

I am summarising all the discussions below, feel free to append/correct if I missed anything. 

* Joint Leadership Meeting:
TC raised the topic of help-most-needed list to Board of Directors during the Joint leadership meeting and briefed the progress on adding the business value to each item in the list(thanks lance for working on those). TC raised the point of not getting help on those items which are there for many years. For example, many companies using designate and glance but there is no help from those companies in term of contributors.
There are few ideas to market and publish this list on different platform and stakeholders. Alan gave a good idea to pick and publish one of the items in the foundation newsletter.

For the first time, we had two volunteers from the Board of Directors, 1. Prakash Ramchandran 2. Allison Randal who will broadcast this list in companies and universities to get some contributors. Big thanks for helping on this. 

* Forum:   'Planning & Defining Structure for ‘Help most needed’ list' [2]
We hosted forum sessions dedicated to further discussion on this 'help most needed’ list planning and future Structure. 
We discussed the ideas of defining the template for new entry and if there can be any exit criteria. There was mixed suggestion on exit criteria and how we make this list more effective. It is not easy to get help from companies at least now where many of the companies are reducing their upstream developers. Allison suggested that foundation staff and BoD are the good candidates to bridge between list and companies. 
She also suggested to reach out to professor instead of the student at OpenStack-interested universities and volunteers to reach out to OSU for that. Below are the action items we collected from that session. If you would like to volunteer for any of the unassigned AI, feel free to reach out to TC.

Action Items:
- (suggestion made by Alan Clark at joint leadership meeting) Pick a random item from the list and highlight it in the foundation newsletter (ttx)
- (suggestion made by wendar) OSF Staff and BoD acting as matchmaker between list items and ecosystem companies who may be a good fit for pitching in (prakash, wendar)
- make clear that we don't need full-time commitments, but we do need long-term commitments - gmann
- pair up glance contribution needs with Edge WG participants who are interested in integrating/improving it to ensure it's also maintained
- UC has a stronger connection to users/operators and could also help identify potential organizations who are interested in the long-term survival of these projects
- (wendar)Identify professors at OpenStack-interested universities and give them project ideas. No point in advertising directly to students (post-doctorate programs in particular, not undergraduate programs)
- adjust the business value sections to make it clear where these contributions impact the bottom line/profits arising from solving the problem statements (evrardjp asettle)
- Reach user groups?
- wendar will reach out to OSU

* PTG: 'Evolution of help-most-needed list' [3]
PTG discussion collected the good steps forward and working items to redefine/replan this list.  The suggestion is to remove the cap on the number of items in the help needed list. It will be uncapped and will be renamed to something else. zaneb already proposed the renaming the entry template idea [4].  The list will be reiterated annually and new list obviously can have items from previous year list.  Leveraging User Survey on grabbing information about project usage and what project companies contribute can provide good data to TC to decide the reach out companies for the help needed items. Below are the AI from PTG discussion-

Action Items:
- Update ML regarding forum session + discussion around uncapping list (gmann)
- Suggest adding questions in user survey (ttx)
- Rename "help most needed" to <??> (zaneb, asettle)
- Uncap the list & add governance docs surrounding annual resubmission for items (ttx, evrardjp)
- Include a "completition/exit/etc criteria"
- Include (or not?) SIGs in all of this (to be discussed in reviews)

[1] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/help-most-needed.html 
[2] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/Den-forum-help-most-needed 
[3] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/tc-train-ptg
[4] https://review.opendev.org/#/c/657447/

- gmann