Open Stack

Hi all from Atlanta where we have over 4,000 gathered to collaborate in
person!

I'm enjoying the week immensely. My favorite so far has to be the Women of
OpenStack gathering last night. We are onto something cool in this
community.

Tuesday we had two sessions about cross-project documentation and though
Nick was worried there would be overlap, we got great input from each quite
different from the other. My takeaway is that the developers are very happy
to hand doc tasks over to "real" writers but that they can help us with the
specs, with excellent commit messages, and we want to follow the specs lead
by making an excellent template for commit messages and continue to spread
the word about DocImpact. [1] For the cross-project session about
requirements for our tooling, one takeaway is that we won't fix what isn't
broken. [2] Also, even if for some books we discontinue the use of DocBook,
places like RedHat will still figure out how to use the upstream
documentation and continue to improve it.

I really want to emphasize a shift to end-user docs this release. We
created developer.openstack.org this past release, and I want to see how we
can build out more end-user content for application developers. I've been
in many of the CLI and SDK tracks and thinking hard about how to make the
best deliverables we can. Please offer input if you're interested!

I'm also going to write a roadmap for each document -- and though yesterday
I said I'd put those on the wiki, I think I'll put a roadmap file in with
each document. Then anyone who wants to figure out where the book stands
and what they might do to work on it that's high priority, they can.

The Install Guide session went well yesterday and one decision we came to
after much discussion was to standardize on manual updates of the config
files rather than hiding them behind openstack-config commands. Matt has a
great summary in the Etherpad for the session on the tasks for the next
release. [3] I've also been talking to Ironic team about how to document
their installation process and while in the session on Install we did not
have anyone who wanted bare metal in that guide, it may make sense to put a
chapter about why you would use a project like Ironic for installation in
the Cloud Admin Guide. I'd love input on where that fits in our current
documentation set.

I also have to share a great comment from the User Survey [4] that Tim Bell
is especially delighted with because he knows how disappointed people were
in the docs 18 months ago, even 12 months ago. "Over the last 6 months I
think the documentation has improved significantly. I have seen others
recently hold up OpenStack docs as a model to strive for." We are making a
difference across the world and our hard work is paying off. Thanks to all
of you who are a part of this effort -- nearly 200 of us this last six
months. I can't express enough how grateful I am to have such dedication
shine through in OpenStack docs.

Today we have "Patching the documentation process" at 9:50. Tomorrow we'll
talk about Continuous publishing and automation at 9:00, and discuss how to
Beef up User and Ops Guides for integrated projects at 11:40.

Lots more work to do, let's tackle this!

Anne

1. https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/easier_documentation_for_developers
2. https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/summit-session-cross-project-docs
3. https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/installation-guide-audit
4. http://www.slideshare.net/ryan-lane/openstack-atlanta-user-survey slide
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