Open Stack

Excerpts from Jeremy Stanley's message of 2018-08-30 17:03:50 +0000:
> The openstack, openstack-dev, openstack-sigs and openstack-operators
> mailing lists on lists.openstack.org see an increasing amount of
> cross-posting and thread fragmentation as conversants attempt to
> reach various corners of our community with topics of interest to
> one or more (and sometimes all) of those overlapping groups of
> subscribers. For some time we've been discussing and trying ways to
> bring our developers, distributors, operators and end users together
> into a less isolated, more cohesive community. An option which keeps
> coming up is to combine these different but overlapping mailing
> lists into one single discussion list. As we covered[1] in Vancouver
> at the last Forum there are a lot of potential up-sides:
> 
> 1. People with questions are no longer asking them in a different
> place than many of the people who have the answers to those
> questions (the "not for usage questions" in the openstack-dev ML
> title only serves to drive the wedge between developers and users
> deeper).
> 
> 2. The openstack-sigs mailing list hasn't seem much uptake (an order
> of magnitude fewer subscribers and posts) compared to the other
> three lists, yet it was intended to bridge the communication gap
> between them; combining those lists would have been a better
> solution to the problem than adding yet another turned out to be.
> 
> 3. At least one out of every ten messages to any of these lists is
> cross-posted to one or more of the others, because we have topics
> that span across these divided groups yet nobody is quite sure which
> one is the best venue for them; combining would eliminate the
> fragmented/duplicative/divergent discussion which results from
> participants following up on the different subsets of lists to which
> they're subscribed,
> 
> 4. Half of the people who are actively posting to at least one of
> the four lists subscribe to two or more, and a quarter to three if
> not all four; they would no longer be receiving multiple copies of
> the various cross-posts if these lists were combined.
> 
> The proposal is simple: create a new openstack-discuss mailing list
> to cover all the above sorts of discussion and stop using the other
> four. As the OpenStack ecosystem continues to mature and its
> software and services stabilize, the nature of our discourse is
> changing (becoming increasingly focused with fewer heated debates,
> distilling to a more manageable volume), so this option is looking
> much more attractive than in the past. That's not to say it's quiet
> (we're looking at roughly 40 messages a day across them on average,
> after deduplicating the cross-posts), but we've grown accustomed to
> tagging the subjects of these messages to make it easier for other
> participants to quickly filter topics which are relevant to them and
> so would want a good set of guidelines on how to do so for the
> combined list (a suggested set is already being brainstormed[2]).
> None of this is set in stone of course, and I expect a lot of
> continued discussion across these lists (oh, the irony) while we try
> to settle on a plan, so definitely please follow up with your
> questions, concerns, ideas, et cetera.
> 
> As an aside, some of you have probably also seen me talking about
> experiments I've been doing with Mailman 3... I'm hoping new
> features in its Hyperkitty and Postorius WebUIs make some of this
> easier or more accessible to casual participants (particularly in
> light of the combined list scenario), but none of the plan above
> hinges on MM3 and should be entirely doable with the MM2 version
> we're currently using.
> 
> Also, in case you were wondering, no the irony of cross-posting this
> message to four mailing lists is not lost on me. ;)
> 
> [1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/YVR-ops-devs-one-community
> [2] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/common-openstack-ml-topics

I fully support the idea of merging the lists.

Doug