[Openstack-operators] Denver Ops Meetup post-mortem

Chris Morgan mihalis68 at gmail.com
Tue Sep 18 18:13:09 UTC 2018


 Hello All,
  Last week we had a successful Ops Meetup embedded in the OpenStack
Project Team Gathering in Denver.

Despite generally being a useful gathering, there were definitely lessons
learned and things to work on, so I thought it would be useful to share a
post-mortem. I encourage everyone to share their thoughts on this as well.

What went well:

- some of the sessions were great and a lot of progress was made
- overall attendance in the ops room was good
- more developers were able to join the discussions
- 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
- fewer ops attended (in particular there were fewer from outside the US)
- Some of the proposed sessions were not well vetted
- some ops who did attend stated the event identity was diluted, it was
less attractive
- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- YOUR SUGGESTION HERE

Chris

-- 
Chris Morgan <mihalis68 at gmail.com>
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