Open Stack

Hi,

In preparation for the OpenStack Boston Forum, the Product WG recently discussed how to make it easier for moderators and the community to continue discussions from the Forum an easy and consistent experience. The team came up with a few recommendations that a lot of us felt would helpful.

Optional practices and templates: 
1. Use a standard naming convention for etherpad url: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BOS-forum-[sessionname-abc]. This will make it is easier to locate Forum etherpads in the future.

2. Use the proposed etherpad template [1] or similar sections in your etherpad  for the forum session. If you have not already created an etherpad for your session, this template can be beneficial and it includes a few commonly used sections from the past operators meetup. Just copy the content of this template and paste it to your own etherpad. The main purpose of the template is to provide the necessary information for attendees (date/time/location, summary of what the session is supposed to cover), an area to document the discussion, and a "wishlist/next steps" section so participants can determine how to continue the relevant threads from the Forum session after the event/session is over.

3. During the session discussion, encourage participants to use "##hashtag" to highlight actionable items or something that need attention from a specific project team or working group [2]. For example, if you are discussing a feature gap in Ironic, just type ##gap ##ironic at the end of the discussion text. This can help us to aggregate data and produce post-forum summary reports via a script that can parse through the etherpads and extract lines with hashtags. This is the first time we are trying this approach (we did "pilot" this at Milan Ops Midcycle and received good feedback) so your help and feedback would be greatly appreciated! We will know after the Forum but our hope is that this approach will allow easier data-mining of interesting content from the etherpads and provide an easier way to summarize key points/discussions after the event. 

All of this is optional, but please feel free to leverage any of these recommendations that work for you and your teams/topics.  
Please be sure to add your etherpad to the list of Forum etherpads on the wiki [3] when it's available.

[1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BOS-forum-moderator-template
[2] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BOS-forum-hashtag-definition
[3] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Forum/Boston2017

Thanks!
Product WG team.